Chapter 4: Big Science

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Topic 1 – Science Diplomacy

 

Speakers: Dr. Archana Sharma (Senior Scientist at the Department of Physics at CERN), Dr. Pippa Wells (Deputy Director for Research and Computing at CERN)

 

Dr. A. Sharma said that particle physics was not an isolated field but one that affected every aspect of life. As such, students at CERN were sought after by many different industries from space science, astrophysics and cosmology to engineering, medical physics, industrial application and meteorology.

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had been operating for more than 10 years and was currently being upgraded to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The HL-LHC would use new technologies that produced ten times more collisions than the LHC. The upgrade was a daunting feat but might enable scientists to access dark matter. It was an inter-generational project with consecutive generations responsible for preparing, building and putting the equipment to use. It would come into operation in 2029.

 

CERN founded for Science for Peace

 

CERN had been founded in 1954 by 12 European States with a number of aims: (1) to pool resources for world-class research infrastructure in nuclear and particle physics; (2) to avoid brain drain of scientists from Europe; and (3) to restore peaceful collaboration in Europe after the Second World War. It was an intergovernmental organization founded under the auspices of UNESCO.

 

            CERN had been established under the Convention for the Establishment of a European Organization for Nuclear Research signed and ratified by the original 12 Member States in 1954 and revised in 1971. Under Article 9 of the Convention, CERN was granted privileges and immunities in the interests of the Organization. There were also agreements with host countries as well as the Protocol on the Privileges and Immunities of the European Organization for Nuclear Research signed by all Member States in 2004. The status granted to Member States was that of an international legal personality that enjoyed special fiscal and customs arrangements, inviolability of its premises and archives, immunity from jurisdiction, free access for officials and specific privileges and immunities for personnel to facilitate exercise of official functions.

 

Over time, the Member States of CERN had increased from 12 to 23. There were also three Member States in the pre-stage to membership, seven Associate Member States and six observers. The observer status of the Russian Federation and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was currently suspended. Additionally, CERN had around 50 cooperation agreements with non-Member States. It meant that the whole world was engaged in one way or another.

 

CERN had an annual budget of 1.2 billion Swiss francs. Its total number of employees stood at 2,676 staff and 783 fellows. There was also a great deal of associates, including 11,175 users, many of whom used the facilities remotely from around the world. The Headquarters of CERN were in Switzerland but some of its premises also extended into France. The fact that the premises were located across two Host States was a unique situation which facilitated peaceful cooperation.

 

CERN Activities

 

The activities of CERN were set out in the Convention. Overall, the Organization worked to foster collaboration in nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character with no concern with work for military requirements. The results of its experimental and theoretical work were always published or made publicly available. Activities included the construction and operation of international research laboratories that contained: (1) one or more particle accelerators, (2) apparatus for use in the research programme executed on the accelerators, and (3) related scientific and administrative infrastructure. CERN was also involved in the organization and sponsoring of international particle physics cooperation both inside and outside the laboratories. Some important areas of cooperation included theoretical physics and cosmic rays. Other activities included the promotion of contacts and exchange of scientists, dissemination of information for outreach purposes and provision of advanced training. Work was also being done to support the international scientific community in the fields of nuclear particle and astroparticle physics as well as to help define the European Strategy for Particle Physics.

 

Landmark accelerators at CERN

 

The LHC was a well-known collider that had been put into operation in 2009. However, other smaller colliders had also previously existed, including the Synchrocyclotron (1957-1990), the Proton Synchrotron (1959), the Super Proton Synchrotron (1976), the Intersecting Storage Rings (1971-1984) and the Large Electron-Positron Collider (1989-2000). The Intersecting Storage Rings had served as the first proton collider while the Large Electron-Positron Collider had been in the same tunnel where the LHC was now located.

 

Governance of CERN

 

            CERN had a lateral rather than hierarchical governance structure given the amount of consultation that must occur. The supreme decision-making authority was the Council which was responsible for determining the scientific, technical and administrative policies, admitting new Member States and Associate Member States, approving the programme of activities, approving the European Strategy for Particle Physics, appointing the Director-General and managing the pension fund, amongst other things. The Council was composed of two delegates per Member State, including a President appointed for a maximum of three years. Its work was governed by the Rules of Procedure of the Council.

 

            The Director-General was the executive organ and legal representative of CERN. He or she was responsible for the management of the CERN laboratory, preparation and submission of proposals for consideration by the Council, implementation of the Council’s decisions, reporting to the Council and oversaw implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The current Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, was the first woman to take up the post.

 

The laboratory at CERN was for people everywhere in the world. There was a great deal of cultural diversity with users from 110 different nationalities including 19.4% women.

 

Scientific Priorities for the Future

 

CERN was very bold and courageous in its scientific priorities for the future. The plan was to fully exploit the HL-LHC, build a Higgs factory to further understand the particle, begin the design of a 100km future energy-frontier collider (known as the Future Circular Collider (FCC), ramp up relevant research and development and continue supporting other projects around the world. The FCC was a global project with many countries already collaborating on an ongoing feasibility study. A total of 34 countries were involved as well as 30 companies, 147 institutes and the European Commission. The FCC project had an organizational structure operating under the CERN Council.

 

CERN would continue to play a crucial role in the journey of exploration. It must dare to work on bold projects, bridging humanity with the future and helping achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It was important to work together as one community for “one earth”.

 

 

Topic 2 – When the Goal is a Physics Discovery

 

Speaker: Dr. Archana Sharma (Senior Scientist at the Department of Physics at CERN)

 

What is the universe made of?

 

Dr. A. Sharma said that CERN studied the elementary building blocks of matter and the forces that controlled their behaviour, all of which fitted together in a model known as the Standard Model. She drew attention to the fundamental forces of nature on which life was dependent, namely electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity. All of those forces together were what made the sun shine, for example.

The work of CERN was about recreating the conditions of the Big Bang to improve our understanding of the universe. CERN did so with the help of experimental information from telescopes, which provided a view of the universe far away in time and space, as well as through the use of accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

 

The LHC consisted of a 27 km ring along which counter-rotating beams of protons were made to collide. The collisions produced particles that were likely to have been present during the Big Bang. Some of the particles were highly expected while others were unsuspected, hypothetical or even extinct. For example, the Higgs boson particle had been a theory for many years before its actual discovery.

In line with the equation E = mc2, it was possible to observe that the energy generated in a collision converted into mass. It was the Higgs boson that gave mass to other particles by triggering electro-weak symmetry breaking. With enough energy, a Higgs boson could be produced in a collider. The theory behind the Higgs boson had been first advanced in 1964 by Francois Englert, Robert Brout, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble. However, it had remained undiscovered for many years after.

The LHC had been built with the precise goal of discovering the Higgs boson. The project had a number of components: (1) accelerators; (2) detectors; (3) computing; and (4) collaborative science on a worldwide scale. Accelerators were powerful machines that accelerated particles to extremely high energies and brought them into collision with other particles. Detectors were gigantic instruments that recorded the resulting particles as they “streamed” out of the point of collision. Computing was needed to collect, store, distribute and analyse the vast amount of data produced by the detectors. The data had enabled pattern recognition and allowed scientists to predict the probable mass of the Higgs boson. Lastly, due to the scale of the LHC project, huge international collaboration was required across many different sectors. There were many people involved, including scientists, engineers, technicians, software engineers, financial advisors and lawyers.

 

The LCH as an extraordinary machine

 

The LHC itself was the largest piece of scientific apparatus on the planet and many challenges were involved in its operation. For instance, the equipment needed to be kept at 1.9 degrees Kelvin, which was colder than the empty space in the universe. As much as 20–30,000 amperes of energy were required to get the protons moving and it had been difficult to create a cable that could carry a current so large (many conductors, such as copper, would burn). There had also been a need to create a vacuum so that the protons could move at all. Lastly, the collisions were happening 40 million times per second which made it challenging to collect data, including pictures.

 

The Higgs hunters

 

ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) were the two detectors of the LHC designed to detect the Higgs boson as well as any other unexpected particle. They used completely different technology but were working towards the same goal. The detectors were electronic and worked by converting radiation into human-accessible form. For example, the CMS took digital pictures of the different particles created in a collision. Pictures were taken in every single direction so that no data was missed. Thanks to an in-built algorithm, it was possible to quickly sort through the pictures and make cuts based on their relevance. Thus, 40 million collisions could be reduced to about 1,000.

There had been many challenges involved in building the detectors. For instance, some parts were so huge that it had been difficult getting them on site. The enormous size of the detectors as a whole had also made them hard to operate.

Human resources from around the world were needed to make the LHC project a reality. Currently, CMS had around 6,288 people actively working on it, including 3,394 physicists, of which 1,228 were students, 1,102 engineers and 282 technicians from across 57 countries and regions.

 

Challenges in detecting the Higgs boson

 

The Higgs boson had been difficult to detect for a number of reasons. First, it was not produced in every collision. Second, if it was produced, it was very unstable and would immediately start to decay into other particles. As such, the probability of “catching” it was one in a billion. Despite those difficulties, the Higgs boson had finally been discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS detectors – 48 years after the theory had been first advanced and two years after the detectors had been put into operation. The fact that both detectors had seen it had confirmed the discovery.

The discovery of the Higgs boson had been a very exciting, celebratory moment for the world, especially for CERN, and a giant leap forward for physics. The project had also been an example of the power of collaboration. It had shown that addressing problems collaboratively, believing in each other, and forgiving each other for mistakes could lead to great things.

 

Social impact

 

There was now a question of what the future held for CERN. Some ideas included experiments on dark matter or antimatter. In addition, CERN technologies were being used in projects all over the world. Detectors had, for instance, been installed within the Egyptian pyramids where a void had been discovered. CERN also worked closely with primary schools hoping to encourage young, diverse people to enter the field.

The work of CERN could not only have a social impact but would also benefit business, industry and many other fields. A such, it was important to raise awareness about its scientific research and cutting-edge technology.