The Matter of Matters -Post3

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The "Higgs" of Higgs boson is well known to refer to Peter Higgs, the British researcher who in 1964 laid much of the conceptual groundwork for the presence of the elusive particle. 

What is largely unknown, at least to non-specialists, is that the term "boson" owes its name to the pioneering work of the late Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose. 

In 1924, he sent a paper to Albert Einstein describing a statistical model that eventually led to the discovery of what became known as the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon. 

The paper laid the basis for describing the two fundamental classes of sub-atomic particles - bosons, named after Bose, and fermions, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.

India's contribution ...

            India is one the major non-European partner in European Organization for Nuclear research, and become an active participant in construction of  Large Hodron collider  (LHC) following an agreement between Department of atomic energy and CERN. Over the years Indian labs and institutions contributed Hardwares like Thousands of Super conducting magnets, Precision magnets, positioning system jacks, Several thousand other electronic items and much more.

India is also one of the grid computing hubs where data from collision taking place in the underground tunnel are analysed.

Over 100 Indian scientists and dozens of PhD students are working in various experiments in LHC.

 Courtesy: TOI, NDTV                                                                              -to be continued   >>Post4

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The Matter of Matters -Post2

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What is this place??

This is LHC,
The Large Hadron Collider, is built underground at CERN, which is in Switzerland, but the LHC is so big that part of it goes underneath France. It is between 50 and 175 metres below the ground. 
A garishly lit tunnel ten feet in diameter curves away into the distance, interrupted every few miles by lofty chambers crammed with heavy steel structures, cables, pipes, wires, magnets, tubes, shafts, catwalks, and enigmatic gizmos.
Scientists hope that it will find the Higgs Boson, the only particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model that has not been seen yet. If scientists can find this it will help show that the Standard Model is right and show what the universe is made of.


The LHC starts with hydrogen atoms, and ionizes the atoms' electrons so that protons are left. Protons are parts of atoms with a positive charge. The LHC accelerates these protons through a giant super conducted circular tunnel 17 miles (27 kilometers) long. The protons are moved around the Large Hadron Collider at very high speeds by giant supercooled electromagnets. These magnets have to be very cold to work and they are cooled by a liquid helium. The protons hit one another at close to the speed of light and convert to energy using E=MC2. It then reverses and creates mass.


What is Higgs Boson?
        A theoretical particle thought to be the missing link in the standard model of the universe, which is thought to give mass to all matter. Often called the "God particle".


Bosons are named after a man called Satyendra Nath Bose an indian physicist.
Peter Ware Higgs, a British physicist predicts the existence of the new paticle Higgs Boson.

An engineer leans on a magnet in the 27km-long tunnel that will house the Large Hadron Collider 

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment will search for the "God particle", or Higgs boson. This image was taken during assembly work in November

The enormous Atlas experiment is about the size of a five-storey building. Like CMS, Atlas will record the head-on collisions between particle beams

This statue of the Hindu deity Shiva was a gift from India. As the only obvious religious symbol at a facility built for science, it has proven controversial

 Image Courtesy : BBC                                                          - To be continued      Post3>>   Post4>>

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The Matter of Matters -Post1

Go back a little more than a century to the late 1800s, and look at the field of physics: a mature science, and rather complacent. There were those who believed there wasn’t much more to do than smooth out some rough edges in nature’s plan. There was a sensible order to things, a clockwork universe governed by Newtonian forces, with atoms as the foundation of matter. Atoms were indivisible by definition.


But then strange things started popping up in laboratories: x-rays, gamma rays, a mysterious phenomenon called radioactivity. Physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron. Atoms were not indivisible after all, but had constituents. Was it, as Thomson believed, a pudding, with electrons embedded like raisins? No.
In 1911 physicist Ernest Rutherford announced that atoms are mostly empty space, their mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus orbited by electrons.


Physics underwent one revolution after another. Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) begat the general theory of relativity (1915), and suddenly even such reliable concepts as absolute space and absolute time had been discarded in favor of a mind-boggling space-time fabric in which two events can never be said to be simultaneous. Matter bends space; space directs how matter moves. Light is both a particle and a wave. Energy and mass are inter- changeable. Reality is probabilistic and not deterministic: Einstein didn’t believe that God plays dice with the universe, but that became the scientific orthodoxy.


By the early 1930s Ernest Lawrence had invented the first circular particle accelerator, or “cyclotron.” It fit in his hand.


We know things today that Einstein, Rutherford, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and the rest of the great physicists of a century ago couldn’t have imagined. But we’re nowhere near a final theory of physical reality. Molecules are made of atoms; atoms are made of particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons; protons and neutrons are made of odd things called quarks and gluons—but already we’re into a fuzzy zone. Are quarks fundamental particles, or made of something smaller yet? .......
Courtesy National geographic
 - This is just an introduction about matters which you may also know  ...  
                              - To be continued....  >>Post2   >>Post3

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