CERN Concern...

 

 

 

The Biggest Curiosity Quest?

What Came First?

Chicken or Eggs?

What about Higgs?

What Came First?

Field or Boson?

Give Science a Test,

Not a Big Concern,

We do have LHC at CERN,

And Learned Lesson,

That there is more,

And more to Learn,

Well, Science is Fun,

Give LHC few more Run,

We have History to Remake,

After all, LHC is “A Piece of Cake”.

Since the 19th century physics has been trying very hard to find the elementary particles, the fundamental building blocks of nature. Today it's the job of particle physicists who literally study the building blocks of nature and their properties. Speaking of which CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research just outside Geneva. It is kind of wonderland for particle physicists as there are thousands of physicists from around the world who are involved in research there. It's got everything that a small town should have like restaurants, a post office, travel agents, hotels. It's a kind of town populated exclusively, though, by particle physicists. Particle physics is a thriving field that gave us understanding that objects around us are made of atoms which in turn are made of subatomic elementary particles. The idea that all matter is fundamentally composed of elementary particles dates from at least the 6^th century BC. Democritus was the guy who really pushed an idea that his predecessor didn't write anything and publish or perish in the academic world. Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher and a true scientist, 2,500 years ago he had the idea that the world is made of countless indivisible particles in a void. The word atom, after the Greek word atomos meaning "indivisible", Democritus was the first to print the idea that the world is made of atoms what we would now call elementary particles. Democritus had the idea that you see a bunch of things around as liquids like water, solids like wood, you see air are the substances that appear very different with different properties, they look different, they react differently and yet they are not fundamentally different but just different arrangements of the same underlying thing called atoms. Ancient Greeks would have thought these were all fundamentally different things, but the atomists like Democritus had this astonishing idea about the way the world works. Today, particle physicists are driven by the same impulse as the Democritus. Even though atoms weren't truly elementary that he was on the right track and it took a long time to get that idea right, it turns out to be right and so particle physicists now are the intellectually descendant of Democritus's ideas that we call as particle physics. He was a man with passionate desire to know the Cosmos, scientists give him credit for launching the bandwagon we currently knows particle physics and so essentially Democritus was the first theoretical particle physicist or the father of particle physics. Since then atoms are denoted as the smallest particle of a chemical element, but physicists soon discovered that atoms are not, in fact, the fundamental particles of nature, but are conglomerates of even smaller particles.

 

  

 

The periodic table of the chemical elements as we know it that dates back to the 19th century. So at the end of the 19th century, the understood theory of what the universe is made from is, there are more than a hundred different chemical elements. John Dalton, through his work on stoichiometry, concluded that each element of nature was composed of a single, unique type of particle. And thanks to this Dalton's atomic theory, what he said was that for every element like hydrogen, and helium, lithium and so on, there was an atom, which was thought to be something fundamental, indivisible, indestructible little thing and you had different atoms, one for every element. Then at the turn of the 20th century when the electron was discovered, that revised everything. In the early 1930s, it was discovered that the nucleus itself is made of even smaller things called protons and neutrons. Inside the atomic nucleus, in the middle there are big heavy particles protons and neutrons stuck together by the nuclear force and there are electrons orbiting on the outside attracted to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force. And so we got the model of the atom that we all learn about in school, which is a positively charged nucleus which contains most of the mass of the atom around which go these electrons.  Now, if you look at the periodic table in the way that the elements were arranged, there are certain patterns in the properties of the different chemical elements as the way they are arranged. They get more reactive as you go down and that was sort of indication of some deeper structure. So essentially you can explain the properties of all these different elements by different numbers of electrons going around the outside of atoms. The electrons are what determine the chemical properties of that particular element. The proton is positively charged while the neutron is electrically neutral; these nucleons are much heavier or massive than electrons. We thought these were elementary but turns out that they're not; science did not stop there and discovered more particles as you zoom into the nucleus, even protons and neutrons are made of smaller particles called quarks. In the 1960s, theoretical physicists were working on an elegant way of describing the fundamental laws of nature in terms of quantum field theory. It was really in the 1970s that the search for the Higgs boson began in earnest, the 1970s were an era when quantum field theory really became triumphant. In the 1960s and even before that all the way back to the 30s scientists had ideas of quantum field theory, but it wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s that scientists realized that this was the right way to think about nature at a fundamental level. In quantum field theory, both matter particles (fermions such as electrons, or the quarks inside protons) and the force carriers (bosons such as the photon, or the gluons that bind quarks) are manifestations of underlying, fundamental quantum fields. We also have neutrinos and muons; so there is a whole zoo of elementary particles and particle physicists really tried to figure out what all these particles were and how they all fitted together in terms of the model. Today we call this elegant description the Standard Model of particle physics.

 

  

 

The matter particles in the universe called fermions and there are force carrying particles called bosons. The Standard Model describes three of the four fundamental interactions in nature; only gravity remains unexplained. In the Standard Model, such an interaction is described as an exchange of bosons between the objects affected, such as a photon for the electromagnetic force and a gluon for the strong interaction. Those particles are called force carriers or messenger particles. Neutrinos are sort of like ghosts as they are invisible, almost undetectable particles and they very rarely interact with the ordinary matter that we're made out of. So that's why we are not really that aware of the existence of neutrinos most of the time. There are trillions of them go straight through you, straight through the earth as they are produced by the sun in vast quantities. Muon is a sort of heavy cousins of electron which is about 200 times more massive than the electron. Also the reason we're not made of muons because it decays into an electron and some neutrinos. They're unstable, but you can make them in high-energy collisions like at the LHC. Gluons are kind of force particles that bind protons and neutrons together and hence called a gluon because it glues things, essentially. So there is a whole zoo of elementary particles. The four matter particles are neutrino, the down quark, the up quark and the electron. For particles that makes up matter turn out to be a single family of particles but then there are three generations of matter particles as the same pattern repeated three times that little bit is a mystery. On top there are bosons and then way up all by itself in the corner there's this lonely little thing called the Higgs boson. As a new particle and that thing, ripple in the Higgs field gives mass to the particles which we are made of, at least, is this field. And the Higgs boson really is the proof that this field is out there. And that's why finding it was so important, because the Higgs mechanism; the process by which the particles get mass is absolutely fundamental to the Standard Model. It's kind of like the keystone in an arch.

 

 

So what’s about the Higgs? It’s not the biggest curiosity question that what came first, chicken or eggs? But what came first the Higgs field or Higgs boson? In the Higgs boson's case, the field came first. Fundamentally speaking what gives you mass is a very different question to what gives you weight. Gravity pulling down on your body gives you weight and your weight can change depending on the gravity of the planet that you are on, even though you're so made of the same amount of stuff that we call as a mass. Before Newton’s contribution, most previously known forces arose when two objects pushed or pulled each other via physical contact, whereas Newton’s gravitational force evidently operated across great voids of empty space. Over the next two centuries after Newton, such concerns gave rise to the notion of a space-filling field, which can be imagined as the medium that transmits the message. By the 1840s, however, the creators of hydrodynamics were treating fluid properties—velocity, density, pressure—as fields. Hydrodynamic concepts, in turn, soon provided the basis for the 19th century’s most celebrated field theory, the electromagnetism of James Clerk Maxwell. Today no one doubts the reality of fields; anyone who has sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper above a bar magnet has perceived a field pretty directly. Back then, the existence of fields was less obvious. More precisely, a field is a continuous and continuously varying plane of action through which disturbances propagate, eliminating the conceptual knot of “action at a distance.” The idea of modern physics is that the world is not made of particles but it's made of fields, a field unlike a particle is spread out everywhere throughout the universe. That there is a field filling the universe and what that means mathematically just that at every point in space; there is a number at every point in space and time, the value of the field just like the temperature of the air in this room and every point there's a value the temperature at that point of the air but this is not some phenomenology of the matter this is this a fundamental feature of reality. The most familiar example of this is light: light is simultaneously a wave in the electromagnetic field and a stream of particles called photons. Photon is the particle of light that transmits the electromagnetic interaction, so light itself is also an electromagnetic phenomenon. Very much similar to our current description of Nature, every particle is a wave in a field. The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new kind of field that fills the entire Universe that gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. On July 4th 2012, CERN scientists announced that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson that Peter Higgs predicted back in 1964; this discovery was a massive worldwide media sensation. The existence of this mass-giving Higgs field was confirmed in 2012, when the Higgs boson particle was discovered at CERN. Particles get their mass by interacting with the Higgs field; they do not have a mass of their own. The stronger a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the heavier the particle ends up being. Photons, for example, do not interact with Higgs field and therefore have no mass. Yet other elementary particles, including electrons, quarks and bosons do interact and hence have a variety of masses. Peter Higgs and his colleagues with whom he was working with roundabout the same time essentially said that imagine that throughout the entire universe there is an additional cosmic quantum field and just like the other fields that these massive particles are ripples move through it. Higgs bosons are these things that scientists think are massive and are imbued with mass by Higgs field. Back in the 1960s, Scientist had the idea of the Higgs boson but they hadn't actually seen evidence for it. So Peter Higgs went back to his paper and he said, well, I need to connect this with something that could be experimentally measured. And what he added to his paper was basically one line that said, if this cosmic energy field that gives mass to all the particles exists, then you should be able to create a ripple or a disturbance in it which would show up. Because it can be used to pretty much explain all the physics that we can see around us as some scientists think that it's the closest we have to a “theory of everything”. So we can use this science in principle to describe everything from how a light bulb produces photons to how atoms are fused together inside stars. And as we know how the formation of stars then caused a tremendous ripple effect and helped shape the universe as we know it. Heat within the stars caused the conversion of helium and hydrogen into almost all the remaining elements in the universe. In turn, those elements became the building blocks for planets, moons, life, everything we see today. This ecosystem of everything was only possible because of the many stages in the universe’s development. While countless questions about the origins of our universe remain, it’s only a matter of time for some long-sought answers to emerge.

 

 

Peter Higgs wrote his paper in early 1964, he had this idea which was written down with very elegant mathematics. The Higgs field named after him, although many others contributed to the idea. And this theory is really a kind of incredible achievement as this was not the idea of a single lone genius like Einstein but democratic idea as it took many sociable geniuses to put this idea together. So the next step was to actually look for it because it's very nice to have a theory that fits together and makes sense, but we really want to get the direct evidence that they were on the right track. In particle physics that means building new more energetic, more powerful particle accelerators. The Higgs boson can't be “discovered” by finding it somewhere but has to be created in a particle collision. Once created, it transforms – or “decays” – into other particles that can be detected in particle detectors. This is a really the way that particle physics gets its direct evidence by Einstein's famous equation (E=Mc2) relating the energy of an object at rest to its mass times the speed of light squared. It's the energy a particle has when it's not moving, so it enables us to bring into existence new particles with heavier masses than before if we can squeeze a lot of energy into a very tiny amount of space. So that's what a particle accelerator does, it accelerates other particles to extremely high velocities. Once those particles get a tremendous amount of energy together and then accelerator smashes them together, so there's a lot of energy in very tiny amount of space that creates more massive particles. Physicists look for traces of these particles in data collected by the detectors. The challenge is that these particles are also produced in many other processes, plus the Higgs boson only appears in about one in a billion LHC collisions. But careful statistical analysis of enormous amounts of data uncovered the particle's faint signal in 2012. Ten years ago, on 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented compelling evidence for the discovery of a new particle, Higgs boson to a packed auditorium at CERN. This confirmed the existence of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, first predicted by theorists in the 1960s. In CERN’s auditorium, Peter Higgs wiped away tears of joy, and François Englert paid tribute to his late colleague and collaborator, Robert Brout, who did not live to see proof of the mechanism that bears his name. At Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment to produce Higgs bosons, two beams of particles are accelerated to very high energies and allowed to collide within a particle detector. The two experiments ATLAS and CMS at CERN, both of these are very big and really look like an alien spaceship. They're given lots of energy when smashed into each other. So as we know Einstein's equation (E=Mc2) that tells us that energy and matter are essentially interchangeable. The amount of mass you can make is equal to the energy (E) divided by square of the speed of light (c). So that tells you how heavy the particle is that you can possibly create. And that's one way of doing physics, that's how the Higgs was discovered. This particle had no electrical charge, it was short-lived and it decayed in ways that the Higgs boson should, according to theory. To confirm if it really was the Higgs boson, physicists needed to check its “spin” – the Higgs boson is the only particle to have a spin of zero as hypothesized in 1964 by Peter Higgs. In the mainstream media, the Higgs boson has often been called the "God particle" from the 1993 book The God Particle by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, although the nickname is not endorsed by many physicists. Discovering the Higgs boson was just the beginning. In the ten years since, physicists have examined how strongly it interacts with other particles, to see if this matches theoretical predictions. When two protons collide within the LHC, it is their constituent quarks and gluons that interact with one another. These high-energy interactions can, through well-predicted quantum effects, produce a Higgs boson, which would immediately transform – or “decay” – into lighter particles that ATLAS and CMS detectors could observe. The scientists therefore needed to build up enough evidence to suggest that particles that could have appeared from a Higgs production and transformation were indeed the result of such a process. Interaction strength can be measured experimentally by looking at Higgs boson production and decay: the heavier a particle the more likely the Higgs boson is to decay into or be produced from it. Interaction with tau leptons was discovered in 2016 and interaction with top and bottom quarks in 2018. But there is much more still to learn about this elusive particle.

 

 

The discovery of the Higgs boson was a historic event, but we are still only at the beginning in our understanding of this new particle. And to make some new, much heavier particle and you observe it like the Higgs; the mass of the thing that you can make is limited by how much energy you can put into the collision. Scientists are not done, Large Hadron Collider was not built just to find the Higgs boson it was built to find new particles, LHC was shut down for maintenance purpose just before the start of Run 3, they tightened the screws once again as they are going to lift it up to a much higher energy. The four big LHC experiments have performed major upgrades to their data readout and selection systems, with new detector systems and computing infrastructure. In 2022 CERN reopened the Large Hadron Collider after a three-year closure to upgrade the power; at these levels it might be able to find dark matter. The changes will allow them to collect significantly larger data samples, with data of higher quality than in previous runs. The LHCb experiment underwent a complete revamp and looks to increase its data taking rate by a factor of ten, while ALICE is aiming at a staggering fifty-fold increase in the number of recorded collisions. Run 3, a new period of data taking, began in July 2022 for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), after more than three years of upgrade and maintenance work; with collisions at unprecedented energy levels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) marking the launch of the new physics season at CERN’s flagship accelerator. The LHC will now run for close to four years at the record collision energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (TeV) – 6.8 TeV per beam. LHC Run 3 was started on 5 July, the day after the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The ATLAS and CMS detectors expect to record more collisions during Run 3 than in the two previous runs combined. To celebrate ten years of Higgs research at the LHC with CERN, the start of Run 3 of the LHC was streamed live on CERN’s social media channels and high quality Eurovision satellite link on 5 July 2022. CERN invited scientifically oriented people who are hungry for physics, to be present physically at CERN or online from around the world to enjoy the celebrations of the anniversary of this historical discovery, to celebrate past and present achievements for particle physics and science, to witness the start of Run 3 at the LHC on 5 July and to understand how CERN is preparing future research. Live commentary in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) from the CERN Control Centre walked audience through the operation stages that take proton beams from their injection into the LHC to collision points. A live Q&A session with experts from the accelerators and experiments concluded the live stream. In preparation for data taking, the four big LHC experiments performed major upgrades to their data readout and selection systems, with new detector systems and computing infrastructure. The changes will allow them to collect significantly larger data samples, of higher quality than previous runs. The restart marked the beginning of preparations for the third run of the LHC, called Run 3, which planed four years of physics-data taking at world-record collision energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts (13.6 TeV). The discovery of the Higgs was such a big deal and now that we have found it, we can move beyond everyday physics, there are dark matter, dark energy and black holes out there in the universe. Particle Physicists are hopeful that the Higgs boson will not simply be the end of one story, but the beginning of the next era in fundamental physics. The subsequent 10 years prior to Run 3 have seen impressive advances in our understanding of the Higgs boson's properties, and how they determine the features of the universe. There is much more still to be learned and so now...

It’s not the thing that bothers what came first; chicken or eggs?

But the biggest curiosity quest is dark matter with the boson Higgs.

 

 

This is First Deep Field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date, looking far back in time when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This Webb’s First Deep Field image is covering a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground and yet overflowing with detail as it reveals thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time in this tiny sliver of vast Universe. It shows galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster. There are stars, the things with the kind of cross twinkie patterns. But everything else, pretty much, is a galaxy. These are extremely distant galaxies, sort of almost out to the edge of as far as we can see with telescopes. So, for example, in the center of the image, you can see there's a kind of cluster of galaxies, kind of blobs. Now, hopefully you should be able to also see that on this image, there is this smearing pattern. So there's kind of circular structures arranged around this central cluster of galaxies. Einstein's notebooks indicate that he had realized that if an observer was located at the correct distance, the deflected light rays from around the celestial object would converge to make a magnified image. This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing, and the amount of bending is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity that light should be bent by gravity. Gravitational lensing basically acts like a lens and we end up getting this kind of smeared multiple image of the same galaxy across the whole sky, which you can see in this JWST’s first image so called Webb Deep Field. Now we can use that to measure how much dark matter there is in the galaxies. There are a number of different ways of working out how much dark matter is out there in the universe. So there is the lensing method which can be used across the whole sky essentially and map the distribution of dark matter by how light is being bent through space and comparing it with the bending expected from the visible matter. Because more the gravity means more mass there is, the more strongly lensed the light will be and more will be the pronounced lensing effect. So we can use this lensing to effectively work out how much mass there is in the center of this image. And then we compare that with the visible light that we can see with our telescopes. We can see there are lots of galaxies here; this is obviously a very large amount of mass. So if we overlay a map of where the matter appears to be in this image from lensing, sometimes we actually find a very large discrepancy between the amount of stuff that we can see with our telescopes and the amount of stuff that we know needs to be there to explain this lensing effect; in this way we have evidence of dark matter from lensing. We can also trace the dark matter by looking at the rotations of stars around galaxies. We can calculate to a fairly high degree of confidence how much dark matter is out there, even though we can't see it which Vera Rubin famously proved it. Vera Rubin in the 1970s was looking at Andromeda and the other neighboring galaxies; she measured the rotation speeds of the stars in those galaxies. The expectation was that these galaxies were like the solar system with most of the mass concentrated towards the center. So closer to the center of the galaxy you have lots of gravity and the stars should be orbiting very quickly in order to not fall into the center and just like the planets the speeds of stars in the spiral disk were expected to fall as gravity gets weaker towards the edge of the galaxy, but this was not what Rubin found. The rotation speed of stars did not diminish but remained roughly the same all the way to the edge of the galaxies. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. Identifying the galaxy rotation problem, her work provided the first evidence for the existence of something called dark matter. It is essentially some kind of invisible substance which we don't know much about but apparently makes up a very large fraction of the universe.

 

Multi-wavelength studies have led to the discovery of numerous new objects in space & have allowed us to "see" the Universe as never before. With advances in technology & the ability to place telescopes into space, we can now see the Universe in all of its light! All the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum have something important to say. We can learn from each wavelength, by observing the Universe in a various wavelengths of light to understand the complete picture. As I said in one of my blog, “Science Philosophy Singularity” that your shadow is relative incomplete true based on direction of light on you and so to get the complete truth of you we need shadows in all direction. Here visible or infrared light is just like that relative incomplete true and we have to consider light from all range of electromagnetic spectrum to get complete absolute truth about universe. Many objects reveal different aspects of their composition and behavior at different wavelengths. Objects are completely invisible at one wavelength, yet are clearly visible at another. Multi-wavelength astronomy fetch us complete picture of the universe as observing it in different wavelengths from radio, microwave, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, x-ray to gamma rays. Since the Webb's successful launch last year, now we have multi-wavelength composite images from Webb and NASA’s great observatories at various wavelengths. Chandra is an incredible piece of equipment and it is part of a suite of other observatories so called NASA's great observatories which includes Hubble, Spitzer and the Compton gamma-ray observatory. And together what that means is along with all the other telescopes and observatories around the world; there is fantastic set of data available to look into and work with. The multi-wavelength universe is just a really important thing in astronomy to collect data for many different kinds of light. Webb Deep Field shows how galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, located ~4.2 billion light-years away, contains hundreds of galaxies. Galaxy clusters are filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas seen only in X-ray light. In the same image later Chandra data (blue in color) revealed gas with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, possessing a total mass about 100 trillion times that of the Sun. Invisible dark matter forms an even larger fraction of the cluster’s total mass.

 

 

Scientist believes that Standard Model is definitely on to something as you don't get this kind of result by accident. So it’s a really stunningly successful theory, but it is not without some problems. And these problems are actually what motivated, in part, the building of the Large Hadron Collider in the first place. The discovery of the Higgs which is really kind of closing the chapter of 20th century physics and the beginning of the next era in fundamental physics paving the way to new physics. What everyone now actually is after the answers to some big, unsolved questions that the Standard Model cannot address. The cosmic pie depicts that ordinary matter of which made all the galaxies, and stars, and planets in the universe; everything that Standard Model describes is just 5% of the total content of the universe. And more than five times of the known universe that we are made of; is the invisible dark matter stuff which is 27% of that cosmic pie. And then 68% is something even more mysterious called dark energy, repulsive force that appears to be causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. So we don't know the 95% of the universe, the lesson from this is essentially that the word “dark” in physics means we don't know what we're talking about and that scientists themselves get very suspicious because it. That's pretty big of what's out there, so that is definitely a bit of an omission in the Standard Model. We have constructed what seems to be this stunningly successful theory over a century with all these clever experiments backing it up. But then we realize that what we've been describing is actually only a tiny fraction of the total content of the universe as having a theory that works really well in the very narrow domain in which we've applied it, but tells us basically nothing about major content of the universe. The search for the ultimate laws of nature with particle physics is nowhere near done and scientists know that they have a long way to go, but as far as the fundamental physics underlying particle physics is done when they discovered Higgs boson, the final piece of the puzzle of the matter that humans are pondering upon for 2,500 years since Democritus. The discovery of Higgs boson moment on July 4th 2012 is quite historic and not going to be forgotten. Its discovery in 2012 was a landmark in the history of physics. It explained something fundamental: how elementary particles that have mass get their masses. But it also marked something no less fundamental: the beginning of an era of measuring in detail the particle’s properties and finding out what they might reveal about the nature of the Universe. The collider had remained shut for three years as scientists worked on upgrading the facility for higher proton collisions than in 2012 when the God Particle was discovered, the detectors, electronics, and computing have all gone through substantial upgrades. There are also theoretical hints that the new physics should be found at accessible energy scales. Much of the efforts to find this new physics are focused on new collider experiments. LHC Run 3 with the increased data samples and higher collision energy expanded further the already very diverse LHC physics programme and now scientists at the LHC experiments will be searching for candidates for dark matter and for other new physics phenomena, either through direct searches or – indirectly – through precise measurements of properties of known particles and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more.