Scientists hope the world's most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, will unlock the secrets of the elusive 'God Particle' when switched on later this year.
Credit: CERN
PARIS: The boundaries of knowledge in particle physics look set to be broken soon with scientists around the globe locked in a multi-billion-dollar race to solve two great mysteries.
Their quest: find the secrets of dark matter and the 'God particle' - a sub-atomic particle that is fundamental to understanding the nature of matter, but so elusive that, physicists quip, it can only be compared to divinity.
Last week, an international consortium stepped up the pace by announcing in Beijing, China, a design for the world's most expensive atom smasher - the US$6.7 billion (AU$8.6 billion) International Linear Collider (ILC).
In a double tunnel 31 kilometres long, particle physicists would collide electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, at energies of 500 billion electron volts.
The scheme - which could be extended to 50 kilometres and a trillion electron volts - will hurl these particles at close to the speed of light.
The resultant collision could unlock dark matter and dark energy, the invisible, enigmatic substances that together are thought to comprise 96 per cent of the mass of the universe.
Engineering studies for the ILC will start later this year with the idea of making a decision in 2010 on whether to press ahead with building the machine. If all goes well, ground will be broken in 2012 and the collider itself will be fired up at the end of the next decade.
"The ILC probably represents the maximum that can be achieved with this type of technology," said Guy Wormser, head of France's Linear Accelerator Laboratory, who took part in the Beijing meeting.
Scientists in the U.S. and Europe, meanwhile, are grappling to be first to detect the most eagerly-sought particle in physics - the Higgs Boson. Construed in the 1960s by a British physicist, Peter Higgs, the Boson is thought to exist in an all-pervading field, giving all other particles their mass.
If the Higgs exists, it would fill a worrying gap in the Standard Model, the century-old notional structure for describing the fundamental nature of matter. But if the Higgs doesn't exist, it will be back to the drawing board.
The Europeans are months away from switching on the world's most powerful smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is being built at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, using a 26-kilometre underground ring.
The LHC will whizz protons, which are far heavier particles than electrons, to energies of up to 14 trillion electron volts.
Until a few months ago, it seemed that the prize of the Higgs would almost certainly go to the LHC. It alone had the power to explore the theorised particle's mass, which was deemed to be a maximum of 166 giga-electron volts (GeV).
But researchers at the Tevatron collider, at the famous Fermilab facility near Chicago in the U.S., believe they could be in with a chance. New calculations suggest that the upper limit for the Higgs is 153 GeV, which is within the Tevatron's range.
Meanwhile, physicists at Stanford University in California said they have conducted an experiment that proves the viability of a low-cost collider technology called a plasma accelerator.
Instead of using a giant magnet and a huge tunnel to accelerate the particles, their accelerator uses a tunnel just three kilometres long to speed up a beam of electrons.
By passing the electrons through a cloud of ionised gas, or plasma, that is just one metre across, the team were able to double the particle's energy - a massive booster effect, they report in the British journal Nature.
Only a tiny fraction of the electrons in the beam were accelerated this way, though, and the beam itself is not 'concentrated' enough to get a good yield of particle collisions.
According to Wormser, "Plasma accelerators are a promising technology and may be the solution for the future, but on a timescale of 20 to 25 years at least."
Dark matter IS God
Undetectable, unknowable, omnipresent, permeating everything. That about fits all the definitions.
no no no no no
Saying that dark matter is God's doing is the same thing as giving up. Just because it can't be detected by our technology doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Go back a few hundred years and people would be saying how gravity is Gods doing. God just stops science in its tracks.
I have always been fascinated by dark matter and if we can actually find signs of it, I'd probably cry.
God created light
before that there was darkness of course. What's fascinating is the rules under which He set things in motion. That's science. I think Einstein once said that God doesn't play dice with the universe. Do you believe in Einstein?
God doesn't play dice
Right, Einstein said that, because he didn't like the quantum theory. He also gave several examples like the Einsein Podolsky Rosen paradoxon, where quantum theory should give false predictions. And he was proved to be wrong.
God plays dice
Einstein later asked "Why does God play dice with the universe?" after he succumbed to the power of quantum mechanics.
You're very off
Einstein used god in a figurative sense, not literal. Don't be that guy. There are more than enough quotes of Einstein cutting the throat out of modern day religions, he just used the term God to describe the unexplainable origins of it all.
Einstein
Einstein believed in a Creator of the universe, like many other famous scientists. It is only logical that everything has an origin and that there was something before the big bang. Particles don't just pop into existence from one day to another. And evolution has a drive and a purpose. If there was no God or intelligent design, why would nature bother with evolution. Why not just have random chaos as most atheists believe is how things got started?
Sorry, agnostics are understandable, but atheists are not open-minded and therefore make, in the long run, sub-optimal scientists.
Open minded?
First of all, in contrary to popular belief, Einstein was not religious. Look it up. As for calling atheist close-minded, I'll give you a link to a video on youtube which really hits the nail on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI
I realise that people rarely bother to watch video links provided by random people in a commentary-field, but I dare you to watch it and try to counter some of the excellent arguments that are given.
If you wanna see something truly close-minded, just take a look at your own "reasoning": "It is only logical [...] don't just pop in to existence [...] why would nature bother".
The expression “God
The expression “God particles” is used as an metaphor. It look like we have no idea what cause the differences between the theory and our measurements about our cosmos. It appears to us that the cosmos is not understandable to us. But we are trying to solve it. Is it not funny that we are going to solve the riddle of “God particles”? I mean this is not accepting some kind of God, this is like declaring war to the idea that such particles have something to do with a God.
But I think it is not helpful to use metaphors depending some kind of superior being in science. Such expressions leads attention form the topic (solving disagreements in science) to the totally boring question why a scientist name something that way. I mean he or shy could name it Kitty particle or Lemon particle it is just a name and it is not worth of arguing. What counts is the particle not its name.
Ralph
A particle called God
Very well said! It's really called the Higgs boson, but because it has been so hard to find, it's got this mystical aura and was jokingly dubbed "the God particle". If you don't get the joke then maybe you don't get science.
I like your suggestion of the Kitty particle - it is a joke, afer all. If it turns out the Higgs boson disappoints (not meeting its expected parameters) then maybe the Lemon particle would be better.
Or since it's playing a joke on all of us, it should be called the Bozo particle.