Explanation:
Why do objects have mass?
To help find out,
Europe's
CERN has built the
Large Hadron Collider
(LHC), the most powerful
particle accelerator
yet created by
humans.
Since 2008, the
LHC smashed protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds.
The LHC is exploring the leading explanation that mass arises from
ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive
field of
virtual Higgs particles.
Were high energy colliding particles to create real
Higgs bosons, the
Higgs mechanism
for mass creation will be bolstered.
Last week, two LHC
groups reported on preliminary indications that the Higgs boson might exist around 120 GeV in mass.
Data from the LHC collisions is also being scanned for
micro black holes,
magnetic monopoles,
and explore the possibility that every type of
fundamental particle we know about has a nearly invisible
supersymmetric counterpart.
You can help -- the LHC@Home
project will allow anyone with a home computer to help
LHC scientists
search archived LHC data for these strange beasts.
Pictured above,
a person stands in front of the huge
ATLAS detector,
one of six detectors attached to the
LHC.
Where's Waldo:
How many people can you find in today's image?
