The Search of the Origin

Frances J. Moreno

What is mass? We can measure mass, but what exactly it is? Where it came from? How many particles exist in an atom? Through the time many physicist and many people spends there life trying to look for this answers. For this reason more than 2000 physicist and engineers of different countries, hundreds of universities and laboratories work together to construct a machine that will provide all of us the answers of these questions, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This machine is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built to make collide protons of 7 TeV of energy per beam, and its main purpose is to find the most evasive particle, known as the “God particle”.

The Higgs Boson or “God’s particle” plays an important role in the explanation of the origin of the mass of other fundamentals particles and elements. This will explain the Relativity Theory and will complete the Standard Model. If the higgs boson exist, physicists will move forward one more step to the search of the Grand Unification Theory, the one who pretends to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force, living behind the force of gravity. It will also explain why the gravity force is weaker in order of magnitude than the other three fundamental forces. Today anyone can be able to observe the higgs boson experimentally, they expect to confirm or refute its existence with the LHC.

The Large Hadron Collider is a huge project and a big engineer work. It is built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference at a depth ranging from 50m to 175m. It will work at -271ºC. While the machine is on, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ. Once or twice a day the protons are accelerated, each of them have an energy of 7TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. At this energy the protons moves at about a 99.99% of the speed of light (3 x 108 m/s). It will take less than 90 microseconds to the proton to travel around the ring. The protons will collide in a diameter manner, and will provide an enormous quantity of subatomic energy that will permit to observe some events that occur in the big bang.

This machine also involves a lot of controversy. Some scientists affirm that the functioning of the LHC could produce catastrophic events, not just for the Earth but also to the entire universe. Some of these events involve the formation of black holes, the creation of exotic massive matter, and the formation of magnetic monopoles that will produce a transformation that will induce the proton decay.

The Large Hadron Collider turns to be a big challenge for the physicists and engineers. These people work hard on this machine, to find the answers of many questions that have been in their minds for centuries. They believe that the collision of high energy protons will produce a Higgs Boson, better known as the “Gods particle” and with this and the reproduction of the big bang success they will be able to notify the world what exactly is mass and how many particles can be in an atom.