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This article was published on June 3, 2015 at 15:17.
The last change is the June 3, 2015 at 15:38.
The four giants of Geneva are back at work today, aim to discover what lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules of current, sweaty physical laws. ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb are the instruments that, placed at strategic ring of 27 km of the Large Hadron Collider, LHC, the superacceleratore of elementary particles at CERN in Geneva, serve to collect the avalanche of data coming from shocks so microscopic as violent. And violent this time, and for the next 36 months, it will be really, than ever on Earth, as it is only in the hearts of stars like our Sun.
refurbished after the long “Run1″ of 2012, which led to the long-awaited discovery of the Higgs boson, now LHC brings these tiny entities, if protons to energies never before produced, for technical 13 Tev, ie billion electron volts. They travel at nearly the speed of light within the accelerator and when they have reached the right energy will collide, as two patrol planes sent so crazy to clash against each other to see, from the remains of the tremendous impact of that aircraft it really.
This time the protons, among the basic building blocks of every atom of each element, will be destroyed in a way that no one can predict or know, will in practice of the great and powerful lights that illuminate a world completely unknown, for understand what is beyond the physical, and we know that at the time it works very well. And this is basic research in the strictest sense: try to figure it out into the unknown and turn it into knowledge.
The tool is the most complex imaginable: 27 kilometer closed loop in which tiny particles literally fly in groups that we as cyclists in the Tour, but that size in comparison of what a hair becomes a mountain like the Matterhorn. Guided the thousandth of a thousandth of a millimeter within this gigantic tube located at the four corners, so to speak, tools acquisition as big as a building of many floors. ALICE for example is 16 meters deep and twenty, in essence is a magnet, a giant magnet, which serves to capture what remains of the clashes of these particles that we know well. It is not a contradiction, these energies no one knows what will happen and what will appear as a product of impact: new unknown particles, antimatter or the famous “dark matter” that seems to make up at least 20% of our universe, when matter “visible” it up just 4%.
Physicists in Geneva, there are thousands of which 1500 Italian coordinated in large part by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), are enthusiastic, expect great things, great discoveries, what you feel is the anxiety, positive, who is about to enter a forest completely unexplored and that does not even know what it is to be formed, such as trees, if there are trees, from which animals if there will be animals.
“Scientists are used to working at the boundaries of knowledge, physicists know it well, especially after putting their hands at the end of a hunt lasted half a century, on the now famous Higgs boson: a discovered that, far from representing an arrival point for modern physics, it is rather a stargate, a true portal to new physics beyond the Standard Model, “said Fernando Ferroni, president of INFN.
As for Paul Giubellino, INFN researcher who coordinates the whole of the ALICE collaboration, the instrument is ready to better, with new detectors, new systems of registration of the impressive amount of data produced every second of operation.
The enthusiasm for discovery is typical of children, but also scientists in those occasions when you are faced with the means to explore the unknown. In Geneva you go to energies never before seen in the hopes that these bumps, probably similar to the ones we were in the first moments of the ‘universe, the Big Bang. A kind of time machine that will take us back to 13 billion years.
What is the challenge for those who do not just knowledge, that has always distinguished the species Homo Sapiens, it is worth remembering, for example, discoveries of physics carried verbatim to medicine, from the old and always useful to X-ray and CAT scan Pet forward and up to hundreds of micro particle accelerators that hospitals seek to extend the lives of cancer patients, pulverizing the diseased cells.
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