Accelerator Science: Proton vs. Electron

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If you’re the kind of person who wants to figure out the ultimate rules of the universe, the first thing you need to do is to figure out what tool you can use. Now some people use telescopes, while others locate their detectors a kilometer or two underground. But, I’m a particle physicist, which means that I usually choose to employ a particle accelerator. But the word “particle accelerator” is pretty vague. There are lots of considerations. Do you collide two beams together? Or run one beam into a stationary target? Do you care about collision energy? Or number of collisions per second? Those are important questions and I’ve made videos that address both of those questions. But another question is “even if you have decided that you want to collide beams together, what particles do you use to make your beams?” There are many options. You could collide two beams of electrons or two beams of protons. You could collide an electron beam with an antimatter electron beam, or a proton with an antiproton one. You could even collide bare nuclei of atoms together. Each of these choices makes sense, depending on what questions you want to answer. Colliding two beams of electrons is something you would do only in the most specialized of cases, so we can ignore that possibility. There are two main issues we need to think about. First we need to understand the difference between an electron and a proton. And, just to be clear, I don’t care about matter versus antimatter for that question. The second question is whether you want two matter beams or a matter and an antimatter one. So let’s talk about the nature of an electron versus the nature of a proton. An electron is a point-like particle that doesn’t have any structure or components or anything inside of it. That means when you give energy to an electron, you know exactly the energy the electron has. In contrast, protons are messy beasts. In the simplest of models, protons contain three quarks, but the reality is more complicated. Protons not only carry three quarks, but they also contain gluons, which are the particles that govern the strong force. In addition, gluons can temporarily convert into pairs of quarks and antiquarks. And the components of the proton are constantly changing, with quarks and antiquarks being created and destroyed and gluons being emitted and absorbed. If we had a super fast camera, we could take pictures of what a proton looks like at any particular time. Here is when it has just three quarks. Here is another time when it contains quarks and gluons. And here is another time when it contains quarks, gluons and antimatter quarks. And that’s just the sad truth of protons. They’re constantly changing what’s inside them. In very high energy collisions, when you collide two protons, the collision doesn’t occur between the protons themselves, but rather from the building blocks of the protons. Basically, one quark or antiquark or gluon from one proton hits a quark or antiquark or gluon from the other proton. But because the constituents of the protons are constantly in flux, you can’t know in advance what any particular collision will entail. Further, since the constituents can swap energy back and forth, you can never know in advance the energy involved in the collision. That all might sound kind of confusing, so let’s hang some numbers on it to help make it clearer. Suppose you repeatedly collide pairs of protons head on and, further, each proton has exactly 100 units of energy. Given that, what sorts of collisions can you expect? Well the first collision might involve a gluon with 3 units of energy from one proton colliding with a quark with 40 units of energy. This collision has a combined energy of 43 units. But there are other possibilities. You might collide a quark with 22 units of energy with another quark with 16 units of energy, which adds to 38 units. The third collision might be between two gluons, one with 17 units of energy and another with 21 units of energy, which is also 38 units of energy, but with different particles involved. Each collision involves a randomly selected pair of particles with a randomly selected amount of energy. It’s really quite a mess. Every collision is unique and you can’t know in advance what any particular collision will be. Combine that with the collision rate at a modern particle accelerator like the LHC, which is about a billion collisions per second, and you have a whole ton of confusion. Contrast this with collider that has an electron and antimatter electron beams. By the way, the name for antimatter electron is “positron.” The first collision involves an electron and positron with 200 units of energy. The second collision involves an electron and positron with 200 units of energy. The third collision involves an electron and positron with 200 units of energy. The fourth collision- well, I bet you’ve figured out the pattern. Physicists have called an electron/positron collider a scalpel, while a proton/proton collider equivalent to colliding two garbage cans. So why would anyone every make a proton collider? There are two reasons. The first is that the complicated mix of collisions in a proton/proton collider is not only a curse, it is also a blessing. By colliding protons, you can explore a vast range of possible collisions. You can look at high energy collisions and low energy collisions. You can look at the collisions of all sorts of combinations of particles. A proton/proton collider lets you explore a lot of configurations more or less for free. In contrast, an electron/positron collider does one thing and one thing well. On the other hand, it has limitations. If you have an accelerator that provides electron/positron collisions at 200 units of energy, you’d completely miss seeing some cool physics that happens at an energy of 149 units. You’d just never see it. For that reason, proton colliders are usually thought of as discovery machines, while electron-positron machines are used for precise measurements. Historically, the CERN SPS, S-p-pbar-S, the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC are or were all proton or proton/antiproton colliders and made discoveries, while the CERN LEP accelerator was an electron/positron collider tuned to exactly the energy to make Z bosons. The LEP accelerator allowed scientists to make incredibly precise measurements of Z bosons. Now, if you were listening carefully, I said that the LEP accelerator collided electrons and positrons. And I didn’t say, but it’s true, that the S-p-pbar-S and the Tevatron collided protons and antimatter protons. Why would you use an antimatter beam? The reason we make that choice is tied up in Einstein’s equation E = mc2. While many understand that equation to say that mass and energy can be converted to one another, the reality is a bit more complex. What really happens is that matter and antimatter can come together and annihilate and make energy. Thus, the annihilation energy of an electron and positron in the LEP accelerator is what made it possible to routinely make Z bosons. For the Fermilab Tevatron, which collided protons and antimatter protons, the real advantage was that antiprotons are far more likely to have high energy antiquarks. Thus quarks and antiquarks can merge and make very high energy particles. That’s a recipe for a discovery. Now, as it happens, the CERN LHC is a proton/proton collider. No antiprotons are involved. So why would the world’s premier particle accelerator not use an antiproton beam, when I just said that’s the easiest way to make the highest energy collisions? Well, it’s because the LHC was built for many reasons, one of which was to find Higgs bosons. Higgs bosons are created by a complicated merging of gluons and ordinary protons have tons of gluons. So there was no need to go to the effort of making antiprotons. And making antiprotons is hard. By deciding to use two proton beams, the LHC is able to generate collisions at rates that are a hundred times higher than the Fermilab Tevatron could. And, as I’ve said in the video that compares luminosity and energy, more collisions, means more likelihood that there will be the discovery of a rare object. So that gives you the basics. But I think the takeaway message is the following. Colliders with protons or antiprotons are for discovery, while colliders with electrons and/or positrons are for precision. And remember that you need both to understand the secrets of the universe.
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Channel: Fermilab
Views: 255,511
Rating: 4.9403839 out of 5
Keywords: Particle accelerator, accelerator, Fermilab, CERN, proton collider, electron collider, particle collider, LHC, Large Hadron Collider, Tevatron, LEP, Don Lincoln, Ian Krass
Id: 9GpfomQ3muU
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Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 11 2016
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