The Large Hadron Collider (eBook)

Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe

Martin Beech (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2010 | 2010
XIII, 218 Seiten
Springer New York (Verlag)
978-1-4419-5668-2 (ISBN)

Infos

It may at first seem that the world of subatomic physics is far removed from our every day lives. Isn't it all just a waste of time and taxpayers' money? Hopefully, all who read this book will come to a different conclusion. Collider physics is all about our origins, and this aspect alone makes it worthy of our very best attention. The experiments conducted within the vast collider chambers are at the forefront of humanity's quest to unweave the great tapestry that is the universe. Everything is connected. Within the macrocosm is the microcosm. By knowing how matter is structured, how atoms and elementary particles interact, and what forces control the interactions between the particles, we discover further clues as to why the universe is the way it is, and we uncover glimpses of how everything came into being.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in the process of coming online at CERN, is the world's largest and most complex machine. It represents the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and its physical characteristics, costs, and workings astound us at every turn. We are literally humbled by the machine that has been produced through a grand international collaboration of scientists. This book is about what those scientists hope to discover with the LHC, for hopes do run high, and there is much at stake. Careers, reputations and prestigious science prizes will be realized, and possibly lost, in the wake of the results that the LHC will produce. And there are risks, real and imagined. The LHC will probe the very fabric of matter and it will help us understand the very weft and the weave of the universe.

Dr. Martin Beech is a full professor of astronomy at Campion College at The University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. He has published many scientific research papers on stellar structure and evolution and several books on astronomy. Asteroid 12343 has been named in recognition of his research on meteors and meteorites. This is Beech's third book for Springer. He has already published Rejuvenating the Sun and Avoiding Other Global Catastrophes (2008) and Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds (2009).

Inhalt

Preface 6
Contents 9
About the Author 12
1 The Story of Matter 13
A Few Searching Questions 13
The Smallest of Things 17
Mysterium Cosmographicum 21
A Particle Primer 23
Thomson's Plum Pudding and an Unexpected Rebound 24
The Quantum World and the Bohr Atom 27
The New Quantum Mechanics 33
Exclusion 35
Fermi's Little Neutron 36
Three Quarks for Muster Mark 41
Building the Universe 43
The Matter Alphabet 43
We Are of the Stars 44
The Hubble Deep Field 50
Moving Forwards 52
2 The Worlds Most Complicated Machine 53
The End of the Beginning 54
Disappointment and Setback 58
Court Case Number 1:2008cv00136 60
Afterwards 62
Overview: A Protons Journey 63
The Journey to the LHC 68
Collider Basics 69
The Detectors 74
3 The Standard Model, the Higgs, and Beyond 83
Generation the First An Acrostic 83
Feeling the Force 86
The Higgs Field Achieving Mass 90
Feynman Diagrams 91
Searching for the Higgs 94
Supersymmetry 98
Exotica: Going Up, Going Down 100
4 The Big Bang and the First 380,000 Years 103
The Big Bang 107
The Critical Density and 110
The Microwave Background 111
Primordial Nucleosynthesis 115
Inflation, Flatness, Horizons, and a Free Lunch 117
The QuarkGluon Plasma 122
ALICE: In Experimental Wonderland 125
Matter/Antimatter: It Matters 127
Getting to the Bottom of Things 129
5 Dark Matters 132
Interstellar Matters 133
Where Are We 137
Unraveling the Nebula Mystery 139
The Galaxy Zoo 141
The Local Group 143
Galaxy Clusters 144
Wheres the Missing Mass 146
All in a Spin: Dark Matter Found 148
Gravitational Lenses and Anamorphic Galaxies 153
Some Dark Matter Candidates 158
The Neutralino 158
Looking for MACHOs 160
DAMA Finds WIMPS, Maybe 160
CDMS Sees Two, Well, Maybe 162
Bubbles at COUPP 162
CHAMPs and SIMPs 164
PAMELA Finds an Excess 166
Fermi's Needle in a Haystack 167
ADMX 168
Euclids Dark Map 168
The MOND Alternative 170
Dark Stars and Y(4140) 171
6 Dark Energy and an Accelerating Universe 174
The Measure of the Stars 176
An Expanding Universe 178
Death Throes and Distance 180
Future Sun Take One 181
The Degenerate World of White Dwarfs 183
Future Sun Take Two 186
The Case of IK Pegasus B 188
High-Z Supernova Surveys 190
Dark Energy and CDM Cosmology 191
A Distant Darkness 195
Testing Copernicus 197
7 The Waiting Game 199
Hoping for the Unexpected 199
Massive Star Evolution 200
The Strange Case of RXJ1856.5-3754 and Pulsar 3C58 208
Small, Dark, and Many Dimensioned 213
This Magnet Has Only One Pole 221
These Rays Are Truly Cosmic 224
Looking Forward to LHCf 228
The King Is Dead Long Live the King 229
Appendix A Units and Constants 233
Appendix B Acronym List 235
Appendix C Glossary of Technical Terms 238
Index 242

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.7.2010
• Zusatzinfo: XIII, 218 p. 157 illus., 28 illus. in color.
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Astronomie / Astrophysik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Atom- / Kern- / Molekularphysik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Hochenergiephysik / Teilchenphysik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Quantenphysik
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie ► Theoretische Physik
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: CERN • CERN history and experiments • Dark matter and dark energy • Hadron • History of particle physics • Large Hadron Collider • Observational cosmology • Origins of the Universe • Particle physics • Popular science • Search for Higgs particle • standard model
• ISBN-10: 1-4419-5668-9 / 1441956689
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4419-5668-2 / 9781441956682