SWISSPUJA PATRIKA 2015
Essay
Landmarks of Switzerland Madhubrata Banerjee Chatterjee Author is PhD researcher in Astronautics and Space Engineering in an eminent UK University, mother of a toddler, from Kolkata, presently resident of Switzerland. Contact: mctech.24@gmail.com
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beam of particles toward the detectors after speeding up and boosting the energy of the particles by generating electric and magnetic fields. The collision of the highly energetic particles takes place inside four detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. Detectors consist of several sub detectors like tracking devices, calorimeters and particle-identification detectors gathering information like mass, speed, charge, energy, curvature of path of a particle, which are used for calculations to detect the particle’s identity. CERN is a beautiful example of collaboration between Physics, Engineering and Computing. Within LHC, particles collide around 600 million times per second and generate 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data every year demonstrating the significance of world’s largest computing Grid ‘’Worldwide LHC Computing Grid’’ (WLCG). Who can imagine a world without the World Wide Web (WWW) these days which was invented in 1989 at CERN. Engineering also plays a vital role at CERN to broaden the boundaries of Physics. There are 10 times more engineers compared to physicists as employees. Engineers at CERN design, build and test some of the most advanced machines so that the data on which the research will be carried out, can be relied on. After a day well spent, on our way back home by the side of lake Geneva I was thinking that with all these interdisciplinary activities CERN is certainly a landmark of Switzerland, depicting Switzerland’s contribution towards today’s world beyond chocolate, cheese and watches. By the way, if you are following CERN on twitter please do not forget to confirm the news before retweeting or sharing their post in social media on 1st April.
was summer of 2011. I was expecting my son and
enjoying a beautiful Swiss summer. One day my husband and I received an invitation from our beloved uncle in Switzerland to visit CERN along with family members. CERN is the European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). It was founded in 1954 and wonderfully bespeaks that Switzerland is not only one of the most beautiful countries in the world but also is the hub of one of the world’s leading organization that is run by 21 member states along with the involvement of several other non-European countries. Although CERN mainly emphasises on particle physics, activities of CERN revolve around other fields like computing and engineering as well. Being a student of Astronautics and Space Engineering, I find it fascinating to look into the future of the Space industry by learning new technologies to build space crafts, rockets and satellites to reach outer space. At the same time, I somehow feel that CERN is the archaeologist of Space. Through the research on particle physics, CERN is actually digging into the past of the Universe and beyond. Naturally, I was very glad to receive the invitation and we headed towards Geneva on the scheduled day. It was a guided tour by the people of CERN. They showed us different areas within CERN and explained their work. Particle physics is their main focus of research. Physicists at CERN use accelerators and detectors to validate the ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics describing the fundamental structure of matter i.e., everything in the Universe is made of few fundamental particles. CERN carries out researches in many exciting fields of Physics like Cosmic rays, Dark matter, Extra dimensions, Early Universe, HiggsBoson, Sub-atomic particles, Supersymmetry, Antimatter and many more. Early Universe experiments look for evidences to prove the Big Bang, which talks about the birth of Universe 13.7 billion years ago following an explosive event. Stars and galaxies i.e., the visible Universe is only 4% of the actual Universe. Scientists believe that 26% of the actual Universe is made of Dark Matter which does not emit electromagnetic radiation or light. Accelerators and detectors are the main instruments to accomplish CERN’s research on particle physics. The circular accelerator Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which consists of a 27 kilometre ring is the World’s largest particle accelerator. LHC steers and focuses the
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