The Incredible Science of CERN

one cool thing about being a mildly successful youtuber is that occasionally I get an invite to a cool place and earlier this year I got an invite to go visit CERN which when I saw I was like hell yeah so I booked a quick flight over to Geneva and how to visit on the day I went and saw one of the detectors I went and saw the control center the data center and also the magnet factory so let me show you what I saw it's CERN there's lots of names for lots of different things I'll start with the bird's eye view just to orient you this is CERN a campus of buildings and load of tunnels underground the border of Switzerland and France there are many different loops for accelerating particles but the most famous and biggest is the Large Hadron Collider the LHC which is a large ring with two proton beams circulating inside in opposite directions it's got four big detectors on it which are placed over crossing point of the proton streams when the proton streams cross protons collide and energy is turned into matter making massive particles which then decay into a stream of other subatomic particles these detectors are made of many panels of gas that detect when a particle passes through them as well as loads of electronics and magnets the point of them is to track every single particle that comes out of a collision I went down and saw one of the detectors that Atlas detector which was used to discover the Higgs boson along with another detector called CMS there are other detectors to Alice which looks at what happens when you collide lead atoms into each other yep you can lob lead atoms around the Large Hadron Collider to when lead collides it forms a crazy dense and hot form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma quarks and gluons are just other kinds of particles and the other detector is called LHCb and looks at some other particles called beautii particles the Atlas detector was absolutely awesome to see in person the higgs boson discovery such a big deal in the history of physics so I felt really fortunate to have gotten a chance to see the detector up close for myself and the thing that impressed me was not only the sheer size of it and it was huge but also the density of everything you know there's loads of big things in the world like buildings but not many building sized things that are made of solid technology there was electronics detection panels pipes wires giant magnets and all of that stuff has to work together flawlessly they can't have a single gap or a section that isn't working because they need to be able to account for every single decay product of a proton proton collision so it was a marvel of engineering to behold massive and densely intricate and one cool thing was the giant hole in the roof which is where they lower down all of the bits of the detector the second place I visited was the control center where there were four big circles of computers and monitors and loads of monitors with all the information about the status of all the different bits of the LHC it was really quiet when I got here because they're not currently running experiments right now they're working on upgrading the luminosity of the beams which means more collisions per second with the luminosity upgrade they're aiming to get five times the rate of collisions and ten times the amount of recorded data the goal is to get more statistics on the Higgs boson they've done the bit where they discovered it but now they really want to study it you see when you create a Higgs boson there are a number of different particles that can decay into by measuring the probabilities of it decaying in these different ways scientists can test to see if the standard model our fundamental description of particle physics is actually correct any deviation from what the stand alone predicts would be very interesting and it's kind of funny the standard model of particle physics is this incredibly good description of harrow the fundamental stuff in our universe works but as a theory it's almost too good a theory because every single measurement we make an experiment we do agrees with the standard model and this is kind of frustrating for physicists because what they're doing is trying to look for something that violates the standard model and the reason is because we know that there's some stuff that the standard model can't explain like how Dark Matter works the gravitational force or why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe so if someone finds something that doesn't agree with the standard model it might lead to new physics that can answer some of these questions that's really what physicists are hunting for so anyway when the beam is up and the experiments are running this place would be really busy but right now it was quiet because everyone's away either working on the upgrades or busy analyzing the insane amount of data that they've already collected I did see this wall of champagne bottles and apparently they have one champagne bottle for each of the major discoveries that they've made and this one's the specific champagne bottle they opened when they discovered the Higgs I'm pretty sure they had more than one of these speaking of the insane amount of data they collect after lunch I visited the computer center this is the place that they collect process all of the huge amounts of data from the detectors the data center was massive and split on two levels and also incredibly warm the volume of data that they have to handle at CERN is absolutely mind-blowing imagine this when the beams are circulating there are 600 million collisions per second each one creating a shower of particles that's picked up by the detector most of these showers are not really interesting because the protons haven't hit each other at a small enough angle see protons are very small so you get way more glancing hits than direct hits so the electronics throws away most of the collision data immediately and only passes about one in 10,000 collisions to be stored in the computer memory but even from throwing away so much data the output of the detector is still a colossal a hundred gigabytes per second if you compare that to all the digital data I've ever produced in my life which is stored in this one four terabyte hard drive a CERN experiment would fill this up in 40 seconds and they run these beams for years at a time so the amount of data they have is staggering but they don't keep everything as they still need to filter out more of the data the detector pit they do more analysis on the collisions and throw out a further 99 percent and that last one percent goes to their 280 petabytes of disk storage that's 280 thousands terabytes and for permanent storage they have a further 340 petabytes of storage on magnetic tape yes you heard correctly magnetic tapes it turns out it's a really good way of storing large amounts of data and they also distribute the data to other institutions around the globe for storage and analysis studying these Higgs bosons takes a huge amount of work and I also saw the computer that Tim berners-lee created the World Wide Web and the first browser which was kind of cool then the final destination for my visit was to their magnet Factory in the LHC protons are traveling at 99.999999 1% speed of light so they need crazy strong magnets to bend them to stop them from crashing into the sides and then they have some other massive magnets to focus the beams right before they cross to focus the collisions in fact this is a big part of the luminosity upgrade improving the strength of these focusing magnets to create tighter bunches of protons so that when the beams cross there's a high probability of significant collision events all of these magnets are made from superconductors cooled with liquid helium when they do upgrades they need so many magnets they have a factory on-site there's several parts of making these magnets which are really interesting they basically consists of many loops of superconducting material which are all glued together they need to be glued together very strongly otherwise they're just self explode and they're all so weird because they don't really work the first time you turn them on you have to go through a process of training them basically the first time you turn them on they're a bit rubbish they don't really go to a very strong magnetic field so you have to turn them off and on again several times and each time they get much better so in this factory they build these incredibly strong magnets and train them to go to really high magnetic fields and for me it was really cool to see because they used to do a lot of work in low-temperature physics so it's great to see a facility this huge so that was my visit to CERN I had a really amazing day there and a big thanks to all of those people who took time out of their day to show me around and you might be wondering if you can go visit CERN and in fact you can so on the 14th and 15th of September 2019 they are having a special open day where if you register you can go and see some of the things that I saw too so you need to go to their website I've put the link in the description below those two days is extra special open days but if you can't make it to those open days specifically but you're in the area and want to go visit they still have lots of things you can see you just won't be able to go have a tour of the underground bits and if you want to watch some more videos about the things that are going on at CERN I really recommend a series of videos that trace Dominguez has done on his channel they look at the science behind the luminosity upgrade and some other things too they're really cool videos and I've put a link to a playlist in the description below so go check those out and you may have noticed it's been a little while since I've uploaded to this channel what's the deal with that well I I've been working on some stuff in the background so from now on there will be one video coming out per month on this channel plus the occasional sprinkling of bonus content I've gone into more detail about what I've been working on in a video on my patreon and if you are so inclined to support me on my mission to explain science to the world there's many ways to do so there and another way is I have a dftba store where I sell cool posters and some other things so you can check that out too so I'll see you on the next video to make sure you don't miss it subscribe to this channel and also if you're so inclined bring the notification Bell YouTube was there's so many instructions I'm incredibly demanding on you can choose to do any or none of those things and I'll still be uploading videos and you can watch them at your own just live your life dude it's cool alright see you on the next video

Channel: Domain of Science

Views: 112,336

Keywords: CERN, Large Hadron Collider, Particle Physics, Higgs Boson

Id: hAK6ovQQqtc

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019