Alice and LHCb

 Hello, all you readers out there!

Today we are hopefully breaking the heat wave and we can start to breathe tomorrow.  My colleagues from Lebanon, Egypt, Peru and Canada and I went into the city for a sunrise concert of Cello and Harp.  It was really a beautiful start to the day.  

It was a really hot one, but we started in the basement of building 40 where we learned about the LHCb, a detector designed to observe physics focused on the bottom quark, or beauty quark in their eyes.  The LHCb is a detector that looks for a decay of the Bs or B0 in hopes of finding more information about why there is more matter than antimatter.  

Paul Dirac first postulated that there would be antielectrons because he was able to solve his electron equations with negative numbers, hinting at an antielectron.  His hypothesis led to his Nobel Prize.  The problem is that we should have just as much matter as antimatter and we don't.  If we did, there would be no matter left, it would just keep annhilating.  We see, though, that there is a net matter and there is slightly less antimatter.  This is called CP violation.  Now it seems right now that all findings are pointing to the fact that the standard model confirms CP violation, but this is a problem for Cosmologists because they want more violations than the standard model predicts.  This deficit is one of the things that the LHCb is looking for.  

The experiment, which we visited later in the day, is based on a linear design.  They want all the information that they can get, but only in the forward direction.  They are ok with losing the backward direction.  They only had 26 meters, so it was either build 2 13-meter detectors or 1 26 meter detector.  They chose the one that would give them the most to look at.  One of the interesting things that this detector looks at is Cherenkov radiation which is the radiation given off when a particle is traveling faster than the speed that light can travel in that medium.  This happens in nuclear reactors and in relativistic situations like this detector presents. 

We also learned about the ALICE detector that allows for us to measure and investigate the gluon plasma created when a heavy ion collides with another heavy ion traveling near the speed of light. ALICE stands for A Large Ion Collision Experiment and that is exactly what it does.  It strips atoms of the electrons and slams large nuclei into each other to create the material that existed at the Big Bang, these collisions are called "Little Bangs." 

In the ALICE detector, gluons and quarks are not seen alone, but they instead investigate the relative numbers of the secondary larger particles, called Frozen out Hadrons.  The relative numbers can be hypothesized using the standard model and then the experiment can confirm what the gluon plasma must have looked like given the energy of the collision and how many particles were involved. 

 

The ALICE control room was fun.  Since it was ALICE, the folks in the room wore bunny ears symbolizing the White Hare.  We saw the parts of the detector and were able to investigate the cavern above the ALICE detector itself.

We finished the night with some really incredible food and a gift exchange and some multicultural extravaganzaness.  It was really a great time.  So much laughing and smiling and good stories.  I have some fun things to share when I get home.