Credit: iStockphoto
ASPIRING PUNTERS ARE currently placing bets at close to the speed of light around the biggest, costliest and most capricious roulette wheel ever conceived. There's a pile of chips banking on the Higgs boson cropping up, and an almost equally tall stack on the supersymmetry square. Other gamblers are hedging their bets by dividing their chips between the two, figuring both will be winners but unsure where the skittering ball will drop first.
Some hopeful betters are wagering on an entire row labelled with the exotic figures of the Standard Model, while the more adventuresome are drawn to a single long-odds square, formidably labelled 'Dark Matter'. But the really astronomical odds are found on the squares marked quantum gravity, extra dimensions, microscopic black holes, or the longest shot of all: unparticles.
As you've no doubt guessed, it's a very special game of roulette and the punters are rather unusual folk. The 'wheel' is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It consists of a roughly circular tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference buried beneath the Swiss and French countryside near Geneva at the headquarters of CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research), the 20-nation body that oversaw the building of the collider and will be responsible for its operation.
The gamblers are theorists and experimentalists in particle physics, some who straddle both those worlds, as well as a coterie of cosmologists. And the croupier is about to declare "Les jeux sont fait".
WHEN THE LHC IS POWERED UP sometime in September 2008 (see, Large Hadron Collider to start within weeks, Cosmos Online), dense beams of protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the tunnel at nearly the speed of light and nudged into head-on collisions inside four complex detectors. Over the next few years, the punters will pore over vast reams of records of the fleeting subatomic debris from those collisions, using a purpose-built, globe-spanning computing grid.
Their expectation is that they'll resolve some of the biggest puzzles in physics, shed light on related (and even bigger) mysteries about the fundamental laws of nature, and be completely surprised by revelations unsuspected by even the wildest theories that currently exist.
"My hope is that we end up being confused at a much higher level than we are now," says Michigan State University physicist Joey Huston in mock seriousness, quoting the caption from a cartoon that adorns the office walls of many scientists. "But I also think we'll have found answers to some of the profound questions in physics."
All this is on the gaming table because the LHC is about to transport physicists across a previously impassable energy frontier into the terascale, the promised land of New Physics. The terascale is the realm of physics opened up when two elementary particles smash into one another with a combined energy of at least a trillion electronvolts, or one teraelectronvolt (TeV). An electronvolt is the energy an electron acquires when moving between the terminals of a one-volt battery.
