REGISTERED BY AUSTRALIA POST - PUBLICATION No. VBH 6369
SEPTEMBER 2011
CERN: unlocking the secrets of the universe
In front of ATLAS: Conor Fitzpatrick, Franz Muheim, Brendan O’Brien and Liz Isler
The word ‘nuclear’ appears in the news a lot lately, and for all the wrong reasons. CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has nothing to do with creating electricity but is in fact the biggest nuclear research laboratory in the world. It is located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. In the close to six decades since its foundation, it has grown enormously, not just in the physical sense but also in the scope of research. It also has become a prime example of international collaboration and how the world can work together to achieve great things. The organisation is comprised of currently 20 member states and more than 10,000 scientists and engineers from around 500 academic institutes and industrial companies worldwide are contributing. One such scientist is Professor Franz Muheim who grew up in Wittenbach (SG). He is a nuclear physicist and apart from being a research scientist at CERN he lives in Scotland teaching at the university of Edinburgh. One of his frequent trips to Geneva coincided with
my recent visit to Switzerland, giving me the perfect opportunity to follow his invitation to visit CERN. Franz, together with PHD students Conor Fitzpatrick and Brendan O’Brien, spent a very busy day with Liz and me, visiting and explaining the enormous installations and machinery, most of them designed to unlock the mysteries of the universe. CERN’s flagship is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), installed in a tunnel 27km in circumference, 150m below ground. 13.7 billion years ago the universe began Inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel with a bang, the BIG bang. Condensed within an infinitely small space, energy antihydrogen – which used to disappear coalesced to form equal quantities of after two tenths of a second following matter and antimatter. When matter and the collision, can now be held for antimatter meet they annihilate in the over 16 minutes by cooling them to a blink of an eye leaving behind a flash temperature of less than 0.5 degrees of energy. Today, we live in a universe above absolute zero. Scientists believe apparently made entirely of matter. that studying antimatter will help them Nature seems to have a slight preference understand what happened during the for matter, which first few moments of the universe and allowed our universe that’s what makes this result extremely and everything in it to important. To find out more about CERN exist. and antimatter see: http://press.web.cern. ch/livefromcern/antimatter/ In the LHC, beams of protons are I have published reports about this accelerated close to place of so many superlatives in the speed of light and previous issues of the ‘Edelweiss’, but smashed together, to actually see CERN for myself was an recreating the conditions immediately extraordinary opportunity and a truly following the big bang. Four huge amazing experience. Editor detectors – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – observe the collisions and gather data enabling physicists to explore new territory in matter, energy, space and time. On 5 June, the ALPHA research team succeeded in trapping elusive atoms of antimatter long enough to begin to study their properties in detail. Antimatter One of the largest computer centres in the world. In one year the atoms – in this case LHC experiments generate data to fill a stack of CDs 20km tall
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