Smashing the Universe's Mysteries

Dave on Earth (9:30 AM): Hi, this is Dave Mosher from Discovery.com, saluting you from NYC.

AtomSmashersRock (9:30 AM): And this is Steve Goldfarb.

Dave on Earth (9:31 AM): Glad to have you on board, at least digitally. Where are you pounding the keys from?

AtomSmashersRock (9:31 AM): I am sitting in building 188 of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, Switzerland. I came out here in 1988, to work on my Ph.D.
I found there were 3 families of particles and they gave me a degree. They didn't give me a return ticket, though.

Dave on Earth (9:32 AM): I'd take that as a compliment! By the way, are there really 188 buildings there?

AtomSmashersRock (9:33 AM): Perhaps more. Perhaps less. We're not as systematic with naming of our buildings, as we are with particles.

Dave on Earth (9:34 AM): I see. So, you're working on something big. What is it?

AtomSmashersRock (9:34 AM): Quite big. We have constructed a 27-km circumference atom smasher that scientists like to call the Large Hadron Collider, and it's about 100 meters underground.
To measure the collisions, we've constructed 4 detectors at various points on the collider.
I'm working on the ATLAS detector, which weighs 7000 tons. Another one, called CMS, is about 12,500 tons.

Dave on Earth (9:36 AM): That's incredibly heavy... more than a thousand 4-door sedans for the smaller one.

AtomSmashersRock (9:37 AM): Actually, ATLAS is larger (22m in diameter, 46m in length), but built with a magnet made of less iron. So it's lighter.
And when I say large, I mean that each detector is between 5 to 7 stories tall. ATLAS is about 40 meters long and 25 meters in diameter.

Dave on Earth (9:37 AM): So a chubby 13-story building on its side. Wow. What are you looking for?

AtomSmashersRock (9:38AM): We are looking for the building blocks of the universe. We want to know: What are the basic particles we are built from? And what are the rules that predict how these particles interact?

Dave on Earth (9:39 AM): How does that work?

AtomSmashersRock (9:40 AM): We take protons and we hurl them at each other at nearly the 99.9999% the speed of light, and when they collide, on occasion (well perhaps 1 in a billion times), interesting things come out.

Dave on Earth (9:40 AM): Purple elephants? Clowns?

AtomSmashersRock (9:40AM): With high enough energy, perhaps even purple elephants and clowns.
For now, though, we expect to see only the building blocks of those elephants and clowns.
You see, even though we will be making collisions at the highest energies ever attempted, the total energy of a collision will be less than that of a bird flapping its wings. But that energy will be concentrated in a very small area - so essentially, we're creating what existed in the universe only a few microseconds after the big bang.

Dave on Earth (9:43AM): So you're rewinding time, in a sense, with the LHC.

AtomSmashersRock (9:43 AM): Yup. The current theory, the standard model, explains many of the interactions between the known particles.

Dave on Earth (9:43AM): So it's a way to organize your toy chest full of particles, so to speak.

AtomSmashersRock (9:44 AM): Yes. But, we have lots of questions. Why are there 3 families of particles? Why do they have different masses? What gives them mass?
In fact, one of the first answers we hope to find from the LHC is exactly that. What is the mechanism by which particles obtain mass?

Dave on Earth (9:45 AM): What's the best idea so far?

AtomSmashersRock (9:45 AM): A theory was put forward by a Scottish gentleman named Peter Higgs. If the guy wasn't so nice and unassuming, we would tire of calling it that. Everyone likes him, though.
Anyways, for his theory to work, there ought to be a particle or particles out there that we could create at the energies of the LHC collisions. So that's why we're all giddy about this big machine, for one.

Dave on Earth (9:47 AM): Ok, so you work on this monster detector called ATLAS. What do you do, exactly?

AtomSmashersRock (9:48 AM): Chiefly software development. For 4 years I coordinated the development of software for our Muon Spectrometer, which the very large outer hunk of the detector that measures particles called (what else) muons.

Dave on Earth (9:48 AM): Muons? What are they? Can we see them?