Over the Easter holidays, 40 students, among whom I was one, visited CERN, the mecca for physicists and on the forefront of scientific research worldwide. It was a truly remarkable place, located on the Swiss - French border and having 27km of tunnels over which particles are accelerated. Even though we didn't get to go down into the tunnels ( though we saw the retina scanners they had for verification of identity!) the exhibits were great, explaining the work done in the detectors, the impact these findings would have on our understanding of the universe and information on the detectors they use to measure the results. For example, the electromagnetic calorimeter measures the energy of a photon as they interact with electrically charged particles. We also had a speech delivered to us by one of the British scientists working there.
After getting curious here, I did some of my own investigation on what one of the four main detectors at CERN does: ALICE. This detector is involved in uncovering some of the secrets of the Big Bang, more specifically: the quark-gluon plasma. In one of the earlier posts, I have explained that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, which are held together by gluons. These quarks are never found alone since due to a the Principle of Confinement (some rule from Quantum Field Theory that I can't comprehend yet). However, if high temperatures are met(100,000 times hotter than at the Sun's core), then the quarks can gain enough energy to be free from their bonds with the gluons and they can then enter the state called quark gluon plasma. This state is thought to have been found very early on in the Universe, near the time of the Big Bang. So if we can reach this state and see what happens as it cools down and stretches, we can figure out how the matter in our current universe came to be.
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After getting curious here, I did some of my own investigation on what one of the four main detectors at CERN does: ALICE. This detector is involved in uncovering some of the secrets of the Big Bang, more specifically: the quark-gluon plasma. In one of the earlier posts, I have explained that protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, which are held together by gluons. These quarks are never found alone since due to a the Principle of Confinement (some rule from Quantum Field Theory that I can't comprehend yet). However, if high temperatures are met(100,000 times hotter than at the Sun's core), then the quarks can gain enough energy to be free from their bonds with the gluons and they can then enter the state called quark gluon plasma. This state is thought to have been found very early on in the Universe, near the time of the Big Bang. So if we can reach this state and see what happens as it cools down and stretches, we can figure out how the matter in our current universe came to be.
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