Euroscan February 8, 2007, 11:00AM EST

A Big Bang... of Innovation

At the site of the world's most powerful accelerator, physicists aim to recreate the Big Bang. Innovation is an unexpected—but welcome—by-product

One of the sections of the ATLAS detector being assembled underground at CERN (notice the men on the scaffolding at left to have an idea of the size of the machine). B. Giussani

The CMS particle detector under construction at CERN. Building these devices borders on art. B. Giussani

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While subatomic particles such as electrons and protons are very small, the devices used to study them are rather large. Consider ATLAS: the particle detector, still mid-construction, is about 45 meters long, more than 25 meters high, and weights about 7,000 tons. It was first imagined in 1994, and some 2,000 scientists and engineers from three dozen countries have been building it since January, 2003. Starting this November, ATLAS will observe and measure the collisions of minuscule beams of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light inside a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collider is under construction at CERN, the largest particle-physics lab in the world, located near Geneva, Switzerland.

The work of thousands of physicists at CERN, which is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, may be highly specific and somewhat obscure to most. However, the technologies they have developed over the years and their approach to complex problems have led to breakthrough innovations with relevant applications in many sectors of business and life. Just to mention the best-known: The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, originally to solve the problem of connecting large amounts of information and making it accessible to physicists worldwide. While the physicists themselves study the Big Bang that created the universe, you might say that the physicists' work methods catalyzed a big bang of innovation.

To see for myself how CERN's network of scientists works together in the name of Big Science, and to ogle at these incredible machines, I recently visited the LHC construction site, accompanied by three CERN scientists—Brian Cox, Torsten Wengler, and Albert de Roeck. What I got first was a lesson in physics. No doubt it's one of the most complex and ambitious scientific experiments ever. When it becomes fully operational next year, the nearly €6 billion (or $8 billion) LHC will be the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

Hypothetical Needle in a Haystack

The LHC is installed in a circular tunnel some 100 meters beneath the ground and measuring 27 km in diameter (the loop actually crosses the Swiss-French border). Inside, beams of protons will travel in opposite directions inside two pipes surrounded by magnets (cooled to near absolute zero—minus 273 Celsius—by liquid helium) and other machinery and wiring. The protons will be accelerated until they reach 99.99% of the speed of light (which is 299,792 km per second).

"Basically, we will start with a bottle of hydrogen gas, open it up, and start accelerating," says Cox. The hydrogen nucleus consists of only a single proton, and "accelerating" in a physicist's terminology means increasing the particle's energy levels. At full speed, the energy stored in a beam of protons "will be close to that of a train traveling at 500 kilometers per hour (about 311 miles per hour),", adds Wengler.

Along the 27-km ring the scientists are building five detectors: ATLAS, the more compact CMS, and three smaller, more specialized devices. When the speeding protons travel through them, powerful magnets create the collisions (40 million per second) by slightly deflecting their trajectory. As a result, thousands of particles will be sprayed in every direction. The detectors are designed to "see" and measure the post-collision particles, and to look for one in particular: the minuscule, elusive, hypothetical Higgs boson, whose existence is supposed to explain why there's mass in the universe—a seemingly basic question that physicists can't yet explain.

Basic Questions

A bit more background: Modern particle physics is based on a "standard model" that explains the interaction between the building blocks of matter. All the particles in this model have been discovered, except for the Higgs, which is why it's target No. 1 of the LHC.