SCIENCE

A Subatomic Venture

ALICE Time Projection Chamber

Imagination is more important than knowledge. These were the words of the famous physicist Albert Einstein, who went on to say that "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world". If you venture into the subatomic world in an attempt to unveil its inner workings, possession of all the knowledge in the world is not enough. Instead, invite your imagination to serve as a guide, because many rules as we know them no longer apply. Just like the story of Alice In Wonderland, this new world may look familiar but it is not fully comprehensible. Scales shift and matter transforms. Transitory twins appear and extra dimensions hide. Nature has the ability to throw us the biggest surprises, so expect dramatic twists and unexpected turns; many before you have dreamed up mindblowing theories and crazy concepts. Some of these have prevailed against the tests of time and armies of knowledgeable critics thus far. Someone, sometime, somewhere, may succeed in completing these unfinished mysteries, or even rewrite the chapters entirely. The book is by no means finished.

Recipe for a Universe

Work on the ATLAS Semiconductor Tracker Barrel

Take a massive explosion to create plenty of stardust and a raging heat. Simmer for an eternity in a background of cosmic microwaves. Let the ingredients congeal and leave to cool and serve cold with cultures of tiny organisms 13.7 billion years later.

To understand the basic ingredients and the cooking conditions of the cosmos, from the beginning of time to the present day, particle physicists have to try and reverse-engineer the dish of the Universe. Within the complex concoction, cryptic clues hide the instructions for the cosmic recipe. Slowly simmer Space, time, matter... everything originated in the Big Bang, an incommensurably huge explosion that happened 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe was then incredibly hot and dense but only a few moments after, as it started to cool down, the conditions were just right to give rise to the building blocks of matter in particular, the quarks and electrons of which we are all made. A few millionths of a second later, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons, which in turn were bundled into nuclei three minutes later. Then, as the Universe continued to expand and cool, things began to happen more slowly. It took 380,000 years for the electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. These were mainly helium and hydrogen, which are still by far the most abundant elements in the Universe. Another 1.6 million years later, gravity began to take control as clouds of gas began to form stars and galaxies. Since then heavier atoms, such as carbon, oxygen and iron, of which we are all made, have been continuously cooked in the hearts of the stars and stirred in with the rest of the Universe each time a star comes to a spectacular end as a supernova. The mystery ingredient So far so good but there is one small detail left out: cosmological and astrophysical observations have now shown that all of the above accounts for only a tiny 4% of the entire Universe. In a way, it is not so much the visible things, such as planets and galaxies, that define the Universe, but rather the void around them! Most of the Universe is made up of invisible substances known as 'dark matter' (26%) and 'dark energy' (70%). These do not emit electromagnetic radiation, and we detect them only through their gravitational effects. What they are and what role they played in the evolution of the Universe are a mystery, but within this darkness lie intriguing possibilities of hitherto undiscovered physics beyond the established Standard Model.

The Standard Package

The Standard Model

The theories and discoveries of thousands of physicists over the past century have resulted in a remarkable insight into the fundamental structure of matter: everything in the universe is found to be made from twelve basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these twelve particles and three of the forces are related to each other is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particles and forces. Developed in the early 1970s, it has successfully explained a host of experimental results and precisely predicted a wide variety of phenomena. Over time and through many experiments by many physicists, the Standard Model has become established as a well-tested physics theory. Matter particles Everything around us is made of matter particles. These occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each group consists of six particles, which are related in pairs, or generations. The lightest and most stable particles make up the first generation, whereas the heavier and less stable particles belong to the second and third generations. All stable matter in the universe is made from particles that belong to the first generation; any heavier particles quickly decay to the next most stable level. The six quarks are paired in the three generations the 'up quark' and the 'down quark' form the first generation, followed by the 'charm quark' and 'strange quark', then the 'top quark' and 'bottom quark'. The six leptons are similarly arranged in three generations the 'electron' and the 'electron-neutrino', the 'muon' and the 'muon-neutrino', and the 'tau' and the 'tau-neutrino'. The electron, the muon and the tau all have an electric charge and a mass, whereas the neutrinos are electrically neutral with very little mass. Forces and carrier particles There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range. The electromagnetic force also has infinite range but it is

many times stronger than gravity. The weak and strong forces are effective only over a very short range and dominate only at the level of subatomic particles. Despite its name, the weak force is much stronger than gravity but it is indeed the weakest of the other three. The strong force is, as the name says, the strongest among all the four fundamental interactions. We know that three of the fundamental forces result from the exchange of force carrier particles, which belong to a broader group called bosons. Matter particles transfer discrete amounts of energy by exchanging bosons with each other. Each fundamental force has its own corresponding boson particle the strong force is carried by the gluon, the electromagnetic force is carried by the photon, and the W and Z bosons are responsible for the weak force. Although not yet found, the graviton should be the corresponding force-carrying particle of gravity. The Standard Model includes the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces and all their carrier particles, and explains extremely well how these forces act on all the matter particles. However, the most familiar force in our everyday lives, gravity, is not part of the Standard Model. In fact, fitting gravity comfortably into the framework has proved to be a difficult challenge. The quantum theory used to describe the micro world, and the general theory of relativity used to describe the macro world, are like two children who refuse to play nicely together. No one has managed to make the two mathematically compatible in the context of the Standard Model. But luckily for particle physics, when it comes to the minuscule scale of particles, the effect of gravity is so weak as to be negligible. Only when we have matter in bulk, such as in ourselves or in planets, does the effect of gravity dominate. So the Standard Model still works well despite its reluctant exclusion of one of the fundamental forces. So far so good, but... ...it is not time for physicists to call it a day just yet. Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description we have of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. Alas, Newton would be turning in his grave! There are also important questions it cannot answer, such as what is dark matter, what happened to the missing antimatter, and more. Last but not least, an essential ingredient of the Standard Model, a particle called the Higgs boson, has yet to be found in an experiment. The race is on to hunt for the Higgs the key to the origin of particle mass. The ATLAS and CMS experiments announced on 4 July 2012 that they had found tantalizing hints of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more

exotic? Finding the Higgs boson would be a big step for particle physics, although its discovery would not write the final ending to the story. So despite the Standard Model's effectiveness at describing the phenomena within its domain, it is nevertheless incomplete. Perhaps it is only a part of a bigger picture that includes new physics that has so far been hidden deep in the subatomic world or in the dark recesses of the universe. New information from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are sure to help us find more of these missing pieces.

Towards a superforce

The CMS experiment will look for supersymmetric particle

Our understanding of the workings of the Universe often progress when unexpected connections are found between what appeared at first to be separate entities. A major breakthrough occurred in the 1860s when James Clerk Maxwell recognized the similarities between electricity and magnetism and developed his theory of a single electromagnetic force. A similar breakthrough came a century later, when theorists began to develop links between electromagnetism, with its obvious effects in everyday life, and the weak force, which normally hides within the atomic nucleus. Vital support for these ideas came first from the Gargamelle experiment at CERN, and then with the Nobel prize winning discovery of the W and Z particles, which carry the electroweak force. But take note it is only at the higher energies explored in particle collisions at CERN and other laboratories that the electromagnetic and weak forces begin to act on equal terms. So will other forces join the club at even higher energies? Experiments already show that the effect of the strong force becomes weaker as energies increase. This is a good indication that at incredibly high energies, the strengths of the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces are probably the same. The energies involved are at least a thousand million times greater than particle accelerators can reach, but such conditions would have existed in the very early Universe, almost immediately (10-34 s) after the Big Bang. Pushing the concept a step further, theorists even contemplate the possibility of including gravity at still higher energies, thereby unifying all the fundamental forces into a single 'super force'. This would have ruled the first instants of the Universe, before its different components separated out as the Universe cooled.

Enter superparticles Although at present we cannot recreate conditions with energy high enough to test these ideas directly, we can look for the consequences of grand unification at lower energies, for instance at the Large Hadron Collider. A very popular idea suggested by such unification is called super symmetry or SUSY for short. SUSY provides symmetry between matter and forces, and predicts that for each known particle there is a 'super symmetric' partner. If this is correct, then super symmetric particles should appear in collisions at the LHC.

Missing Higgs

Track down the Higgs

A major breakthrough in particle physics came in the 1970s when physicists realized that there are very close ties between two of the four fundamental forces namely, the weak force and the electromagnetic force. The two forces can be described within the same theory, which forms the basis of the Standard Model. This unification implies that electricity, magnetism, light and some types of radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force called, unsurprisingly, the electroweak force. But in order for this unification to work mathematically, it requires that the force-carrying particles have no mass. We know from experiments that this is not true, so physicists Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and Franois Englert came up with a solution to solve this conundrum. They suggested that all particles had no mass just after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, an invisible force field called the Higgs field was formed together with the associated Higgs boson. The field prevails throughout the cosmos: any particles that interact with it are given a mass via the Higgs boson. The more they interact, the heavier they become, whereas particles that never interact are left with no mass at all. This idea provided a satisfactory solution and fitted well with established theories and phenomena. The problem is that no one has ever observed the Higgs boson in an experiment to confirm the theory. Finding this particle would give an insight into why particles have certain mass, and help to develop subsequent physics. The technical problem is that we do not know the mass of the Higgs boson itself, which makes it more difficult to identify. Physicists have to look for it by systematically searching a range of mass within which it is predicted to exist. The yet unexplored range is accessible using the Large Hadron Collider, which will

determine the existence of the Higgs boson. If it turns out that we cannot find it, this will leave the field wide open for physicists to develop a completely new theory to explain the origin of particle mass.

Antimatter detectives

Crab Pulsar

The antimatter is missing not from CERN, but from the Universe! At least that is what we can deduce so far from careful examination of the evidence. Matter and antimatter have the same mass, but opposite electric charge. For each basic particle of matter, there exists an antiparticle; for example, the negatively charged electron has a positively charged antiparticle called the positron. When a particle and its antiparticle come together, at the blink of an eye they both disappear in a flash as the annihilation process transforms their mass into energy. The evidence spoke for itself The case file of antimatter was opened in 1928 by physicist Paul Dirac. He developed a theory that combined quantum mechanics and Einsteins special relativity to provide a more full description of electron interactions. The basic equation he derived turned out to have two solutions, one for the electron and one that seemed to describe something with positive charge (in fact, it was the positron). Then in 1932 the evidence was found to prove these ideas correct, when the positron was discovered occurring naturally in cosmic rays. For the past 50 years and more, laboratories like CERN have routinely produced antiparticles, and in 1995 CERN became the first laboratory to create anti-atoms artificially. But no one has ever produced antimatter without obtaining the corresponding matter particles also. The scenario must have been the same during the birth of the Universe, when equal amounts of matter and antimatter must have been produced in the Big Bang. Just one more thing So if matter and antimatter annihilate, and we and everything else are made of matter, why do we still exist? This mystery arises because we find ourselves living in a Universe made exclusively of matter. Didn't matter and antimatter completely annihilate at the time of the Big Bang? Perhaps this antimatter still exists somewhere else? Otherwise where did it go and what happened to it in the first place?

Such questions have led to speculative theories, from a break in the rules to the existence of an entire anti-Universe somewhere else! The way to solve the baffling disappearance of antimatter, and to learn more about this substance in general, is by studying both particles and antiparticles to find and decipher the subtle clues. The mystery demands teams of scientific Sherlock Holmeses to conduct thorough detective work, to uncover a logic that is ultimately elementary.

Clues to the early Universe

Light guides from a prototype of the ALICE Zero Degree Calorimeter The Universe has changed a great deal in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, but the basic building blocks of everything from microbes to galaxies were signed, sealed and delivered in the first few millionths of a second. This is when the fundamental quarks became locked up within the protons and neutrons that form atomic nuclei. And there they remain, stuck together by gluons, the carrier particles of the strong force. This force is so strong that experiments have not been able to prise individual quarks or gluons out of protons, neutrons or other composite particles. Primordial soup Suppose, however, you could reverse the process. The current theory of the strong interaction predicts that at very high temperatures and very high densities, quarks and gluons should no longer be confined inside composite particles. Instead they should exist freely in a new state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Such a transition should occur when the temperature goes above a value around 2000 billion degrees - about 100 000 times hotter than the core of the Sun! For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang the temperature of the Universe was indeed above this value, so the entire Universe would have been in a state of quark-gluon plasma a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. Then as the Universe cooled below the critical value, the soup condensed into composite particles, including the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Experiments at CERNs Super Proton Synchrotron reported tantalizing evidence for quarkgluon plasma in 2000. The next big step will be with the Large Hadron Collider and the ALICE experiment in particular.

Dark secrets of the Universe

3D distribution of dark matter in the universe Its perhaps natural that we dont know much about how the Universe was createdafter all, we were never there ourselves. But its surprising to realize that when it comes to the Universe today, we dont necessarily have a much better knowledge of what is out there. In fact, astronomers and physicists have found that all we see in the Universe planets, stars, galaxies accounts for only a tiny 4% of it! In a way, it is not so much the visible things that define the Universe, but rather the void around them. Cosmological and astrophysical observations indicate that most of the Universe is made up of invisible substances that do not emit electromagnetic radiation that is, we cannot detect them directly through telescopes or similar instruments. We detect them only through their gravitational effects, which makes them very difficult to study. These mysterious substances are known as dark matter and dark energy. What they are and what role they played in the evolution of the Universe are a mystery, but within this darkness lay possibilities of hitherto undiscovered physics beyond the established Standard Model. Dark matter Dark matter makes up about 23% of the Universe. The first hint of its existence came in 1933, when astronomical observations and calculations of gravitational effects revealed that there must be more 'stuff' present in the Universe than telescopes could see. Researchers now believe that the gravitational effect of dark matter makes galaxies spin faster than expected, and that its gravitational field deviates the light of objects behind it. Measurements of these effects show that dark matter exists, and they can be used to estimate the density of dark matter even though we cannot directly observe it. But what is dark matter? One idea is that it could contain supersymmetric particles - hypothesized particles that are partners to those already known in the Standard Model. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider may be able to find them.

Dark energy Dark energy makes up approximately 73% of the Universe and appears to be associated with the vacuum in space. It is homogenously distributed throughout the Universe, not only in space but also in time - in other words, its effect is not diluted as the Universe expands. The even distribution means that dark energy does not have any local gravitational effects, but rather a global effect on the Universe as a whole. This leads to a repulsive force, which tends to accelerate the expansion of the Universe. The rate of expansion and its acceleration can be measured by observations based on the Hubble law. These measurements, together with other scientific data, have confirmed the existence of dark energy and provide an estimate of just how much of this mysterious substance exists.

Loose ends

In String Theory, different vibration of minuscule elemental string correspond to the different particles

Will the string tie the Standard package? Hot on the heels of the Standard Model, some physicists are working to support a new idea called string theory. This attempts to tie up the loose ends in the Standard Model by explaining all the fundamental particles and forces (including gravity) in a unified framework. Underlying string theory is the radical idea that fundamental particles are not really like points or dots, but rather small loops of vibrating strings. All the different particles and forces are just different oscillation modes of a unique type of string. Bizarrely, the theory also implies that besides the familiar three dimensional world and the fourth dimension of time, there are six additional spatial dimensions! These extra dimensions are apparently 'curled up' so small that we do not see them. Which string? String theory is conceptually complex, with a fascinating but very difficult mathematical structure. This has so far prevented researchers from deriving concrete hypotheses from the theory for comparison with experimental results. Not only does string theory involve the complex study of the geometry of extra dimensions, but the way the structure of the dimensions are chosen appears arbitrary and can lead to different outcomes.

For instance, there seem to be many possible ways to curl up the extra dimensions, by choosing different shapes and sizes. This leads to many alternative versions of the theory. In certain cases, the sizes of the extra dimensions are very small and it will be difficult to obtain direct evidence for them. In others, the sizes are far larger and could be observed at new accelerators such as CERNs Large Hadron Collider.

Secret dimensions

Inside the LHC tunnel

In everyday life, we inhabit a space of three dimensions a vast cupboard with height, width and depth, well known for centuries. Less obviously, we can consider time as an additional, fourth dimension, as Einstein famously revealed. But just as we are becoming more used to the idea of four dimensions, some theorists have made predictions wilder than even Einstein had imagined. String theory intriguingly suggests that six more dimensions exist, but are somehow hidden from our senses. They could be all around us, but curled up to be so tiny that we have never realized their existence. Beyond the third dimension Some string theorists have taken this idea further to explain a mystery of gravity that has perplexed physicists for some time why is gravity so much weaker than the other fundamental forces? Does its carrier, the graviton, exist and where? The idea is that we do not feel gravitys full effect in the everyday world. Gravity may appear weak only because its force is being shared with other spatial dimensions. To find out whether these ideas are just products of wild imaginations or an incredible leap in understanding will require experimental evidence. But how? High-energy experiments could prise open the inconspicuous dimensions just enough to allow particles to move between the normal 3D world and other dimensions. This could be manifest in the sudden disappearance of a particle into a hidden dimension, or the unexpected appearance of a particle in an experiment. Who knows where such a discovery could lead!