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Postcards from the Terascale
The sun warms planet Earth, but we live in a universe where the temperature of space is only three degrees above absolute zero. Its energy is so low that we can no longer see what space contained in the inferno of its birth. As the universe cooled from the Big Bang, it passed through a series of phases, each at a lower energy and each with its own set of particles and forces acting according to its own physical laws.
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Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will be the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built when it turns on in 2007. It will operate in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference, between France’s Jura mountains and Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. Experiments at the LHC will give scientists their first view of the Terascale energy region.
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International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider is a proposed new accelerator designed to work in concert with the LHC to discover the physics of the Terascale and beyond. The ILC would consist of two linear accelerators, each some 20 kilometers long, aimed at each other, hurling beams of electrons and positrons toward each other at nearly the speed of light.
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Not Just Colliders
Discovering the Quantum Universe describes the role of the next generation of particle accelerators, the LHC and the ILC, in discovering laws of physics that will radically transform the human conception of the universe. While their role will be crucial, however, accelerators will not be the only tools that scientists use to answer the most compelling questions about the nature of matter and energy, space and time...
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Seeing the Invisible - A Tale of Two Colliders
In particle physics, discovery often depends on meticulous bookkeeping. The fundamental forces in high energy collisions can do their work in a septillionth of a second, creating highly unstable new particles that decay almost immediately into many “daughter” particles. Computers write an elaborate record for each collision event, determining as completely as possible what particles went in, what particles came out, how fast and in what direction each particle was moving...
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Particles Tell Stories
For Newton, it was apples. For Einstein, it was trains and Swiss clocks. Today, physicists use particles to discover new laws of nature in the microscopic world. The discovery of a new particle is often the opening chapter of an entirely new story revealing unsuspected features of the universe.
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The Cosmological Cousins of the Higgs
The discovery of the Higgs particle would open a new chapter in particle physics, because it would be the first of new breed of particle. Every elementary particle discovered so far spins like an eternal top. The Higgs particle would be the first elementary particle without spin.
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Synergy
Throughout the course of particle physics, results from one accelerator have stimulated discoveries at another. Early experiments smashing protons on protons produced new particles but did not reveal the structure of the proton itself. Finally experiments with electron beams discovered that protons are made of quarks and gluons. Later experiments showed clearly how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton – a requirement for understanding collisions at proton colliders...
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Precision
The role of precision measurements in discoveries runs through the history of physics. Precision measurements provide exacting confirmation that a proposed law of physics is correct; they exclude wrong guesses; and, most important, they can provide an opening to understanding aspects of the universe that not accessible to direct observation.
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The Higgs
The Discovery of a New Form of Matter Will Rewrite the Story of the Quantum Universe.
Today’s standard model of particle physics, with its quarks and leptons and symmetry- linked forces, describes nearly all high-energy phenomena observed with existing particle accelerators. Its accuracy is remarkable, but it only works because of an unverifi ed hypothesis that literally holds everything together: the Higgs mechanism.
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