Tier 2 is where scientists will actually access data and perform the kinds of hands-on numerical analysis needed to translate the raw 1s and 0s into energies and trajectories of particles. The crucial element that will make the data accessible, said project leader Ian Bird of CERN's information technology IT department in Geneva, is a type of software known as "middleware".
The information a user wants may be spread among petabytes of data on different servers and stored in different formats. An open-source middleware platform called Globus is designed to gather that information seamlessly as though it's sitting in a folder on one's own desktop PC. The trial by fire that LHC programmers will be putting Globus through—and the modifications that emerge as a result—may be the first practical outgrowth of the LHC grid.
If project scientists can tame massive, worldwide fields of networked data and computing cycles in particle physics, their solutions could well apply across the Internet—in much the same way that Berners-Lee's specialized HTML invention morphed into the very backbone of modern technological society.
Bader imagines future middleware allowing home computers to provide instant weather forecasts by accessing information from nearby environmental sensors. Or it might help sift through a life's accumulation of personal medical records or years of home video footage looking for dimly remembered events.
Ironically, CERN's next great contribution to the Internet could be all but transparent to the end user. These include dipole magnets 15 metres in length which bend the beams, and quadrupole magnets, each 5—7 metres long, which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to "squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway.
All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. What is the origin of mass? The Standard Model does not explain the origins of mass, nor why some particles are very heavy while others have no mass at all.
Particles that interact intensely with the Higgs field are heavy, while those that have feeble interactions are light. In the late s, physicists started the search for the Higgs boson, the particle associated with the Higgs field. However, finding it is not the end of the story, and researchers have to study the Higgs boson in detail to measure its properties and pin down its rarer decays. Will we discover evidence for supersymmetry? The Standard Model does not offer a unified description of all the fundamental forces, as it remains difficult to construct a theory of gravity similar to those for the other forces.
Supersymmetry — a theory that hypothesises the existence of more massive partners of the standard particles we know — could facilitate the unification of fundamental forces. What are dark matter and dark energy? Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe? Matter and antimatter must have been produced in the same amounts at the time of the Big Bang, but from what we have observed so far, our Universe is made only of matter.
How does the quark-gluon plasma give rise to the particles that constitute the matter of our Universe? For part of each year, the LHC provides collisions between lead ions, recreating conditions similar to those just after the Big Bang. How was the LHC designed? Reprints and Permissions. Brumfiel, G. LHC by the numbers. Nature Download citation. Published : 09 September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.
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