The week which began on July 4, 2022 is decidedly auspicious for the physical particles. after celebrating the anniversary of the discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs boson at Cern 10 years ago (a keystone of the cathedral of the Standard Model of high-energy physics giving masses to elementary particles known, including those involved in the thermonuclear reactions that make the Sun shine), crowning the work more than 50 years ago of a handful of Nobel Prize winners in physics, some of whom are now deceased, such as Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mannand others very much alive, like Francois Englerthere we can follow from 4 p.m., live on Youtube this Tuesday, July 5, 2022, the restart of the collisions of protons at the LHC to hunt for new physics.
The live in French from CERN for the start of Run 3 of the LHC. © CERN
The event is important because never in the history of the noosphere has Humanity produced collisions of protons at such high energies, namely 13.6 TeV, and with a brightness as high for proton beams.
Reproducing the Big Bang in the laboratory
It is always a matter of pushing our knowledge of the physics of the big Bangfor example by exploring the physics of quagmaand more deeply our understanding of the fundamental nature of quantum particle fields that are responsible for the structure of matter and forces, for example by discovering supersymmetric particles or Z’ bosons (Z prime, not to be confused with the Z bosons already detected at CERN).
Let us quickly recall that 13.6 TeV corresponds to a energy available from 13.600 GeV for the creation of new particles, energy that could give as many new protons for each collision between two protons since in this unit of energy and due to the relation ofEinstein on mass-energy equivalence, a proton has a mass of about 1 GeV. Many other less massive particles, therefore more numerous, are in fact generated with each collision and it is now hoped that by reaching the new threshold of 13.6 TeV, particles of black matter which would be almost as massive will finally be created, or even perhaps, but it has become much less likely, mini quantum black holes and other effects of thespace-time foam.
Remember also that if it is necessary to reach a sufficiently high energy to produce a new particle of a given mass, it is also a question of the probability of production of this particle during a collision between two protons. The lower this probability, the more collisions are needed to hope to produce and finally observe even a single particle that is still unknown. However, with a low rate of collisions per second, that is to say a low luminosity per analogy with the amount of light entering per second in a camera, it could take a whole Man’s life.
Clearly, high brightness may be essential.
The LHC Run 3 teaser. To obtain a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. The English subtitles should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose “French”. © CERN
Exceeding the limits of the Standard Model
A new period of data acquisition, Run 3 as they say at CERN, will therefore begin this Tuesday, July 5 at the LHC after more than three years of improvement and maintenance work on its accelerators and giant detectors such as Atlas and CMSincluding the teams of physicists expect to record more collisions in LHC Run 3 than in the previous two runs combined. The experience LHCb who is on the trail of a new physics explaining the missing antimatter puzzle in cosmology has also been completely upgraded and plans to multiply by ten its debit data acquisition, whileAlice aims to multiply by fifty the number of collisions ofions heavy recorded to understand the mysteries of the Big Bang quark-gluon plasma.
The LHC will operate continuously for almost four years and with it: “ We will measure the intensity of the interactions of the Higgs boson with matter particles and force-carrying particles with unprecedented precision, and we will continue our search for decays of Higgs bosons into dark matter particles as well as searches for additional Higgs bosons, explains in a press release from Cern the physicist Andreas Hoecker, spokesperson for the Atlas collaboration, who adds, it is not known whether the Higgs mechanism present in nature is the minimal scenario having only one Higgs particle. »
Let’s end with some philosophical reflections to take stock of what is happening at CERN in the footsteps of Heisenberg.
A philosophical quest
” I was born in an environment, I don’t know where I came from or where I’m going or who I am. It’s my situation like yours, to each of you. The fact that every Man has always been in this same situation and will always be there tells me nothing. All we can observe for ourselves about the burning question of where we come from and where we are going is the present environment.
That is why we are eager to find out all about him that we can. This is what science, knowledge, knowledge consists of, this is the true source of all spiritual effort of Man. We try to find out all we can about the spatial and temporal context in which our birth placed us. And in that effort we find joy, we find it extremely interesting (isn’t that what we’re here for?). »
This was the thesis supported by Erwin Schrödinger in 1950 in one of the four public lectures entitled ” Science as a constituent element of Humanism “. One of the founders of the Quantum mechanicshaving worked both for the elucidation of the nature of life and for the appearance of matter in a model of cosmology relativist, he even added: The isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever; it has value only in the synthesis which unites it to all the rest of knowledge and only insofar as it really contributes, in this synthesis, to answering the question: Who are we ? “.
A CERN presentation. © CERN
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