Now for the second part of Day 4 at CERN. In this entry, I shall describe my experience visiting the ALICE exhibit. Yep, it's time to leave the Grid Computing Centre and go back to taking on the excitement of the experiments themselves!
DAY 4: Part 2
At 3:00 pm on Day 4 at CERN I was picked up by Terry Awes of the Oak Ridge National Lab to visit the ALICE experiment, on which he is an extremely influential member. Mr. Awes, I soon discovered, was willing to explain ALICE to me for as long as necessary for me to truly understand what was going on in that experiment. Again, just a demonstration of the supreme kindness of the scientists at CERN and their desire to get the true story of the LHC out into the open.
We drove for a little bit and spoke about ALICE in the car. ALICE is relatively far away from the CERN Reception Centre, but not as far as CMS, which is on the other side of the circular tunnel. Mr. Awes, it turns out, had only been at CERN for a short while to work on the LHC because, as he explained it, the United States had taken a while to get involved with the experiment. When I inquired about this fact, I learned that the United States had been somewhat reluctant at the beginning to get involved because it already was building a similar particle accelerator intense enough to rival the LHC in Texas. However, those plans had fallen through a while before, and suddenly, the United States had found itself no longer the Physics capital of the world. Of course, every country is reluctant to give up such reputations, so it had taken a while for the United States government to decide to help out with funding. But finally, when that decision had been made, Mr. Awes was one of the United States Physicists sent over to CERN to build part of ALICE.
However, Mr. Awes had a completely different focus from the other Physicists that I had met up until that point. He was not a particle Physicist but instead, a Nuclear Physicist. When he told me that fact, my first reaction was to ask him if he meant nuclear as in nuclear bomb and nuclear energy...his answer was that he was involved with neither of those pursuits. Apparently, nuclear in the world of Physics just means that one studies the nucleus and the way that bigger particles that have already been discovered interact. So no, Mr. Awes is not attempting to create a new nuclear bomb and he is not trying to find a way to make nuclear energy a safe way to heat houses...he is just studying the nucleus of an atom. I do have to say before I go on that Mr. Awes is in fact one of the most peaceful people that you could ever meet. All he cared about was learning Physics and that was the end of the story.
I think that he might have been a bit nervous at first because he really didn't know how much Physics I had taken in the past or whether I would be able to understand anything at all about the ALICE experiment. But the moment he got started talking about Physics, there was no stopping him. He literally IS a Physicist. There is just no other way to describe it. I even asked him how he had chosen to become a Physicist and he almost didn't know how to answer. I think that when you love a subject so much, there really is nothing else that you could be but a Physicist.
So, luckily for me, I found myself again with someone who was willing to spend as much time as necessary to make sure that all my questions were answered. Poor Mr. Awes spoke with me not for just the hour that he had been allotted to me, but for an hour and 45 minutes! We talked about everything...from how to get a PhD in Physics (which is quite complicated I've discovered) to the main goals of the ALICE experiment. Of course, some stuff....actually much stuff went over my head. But the underlying concepts were definitely comprehensible, even for the average human being like myself. It is because of his time and effort that I can explain as much as I now can as you will see in the next paragraph.
The first surprise was that ALICE is not said as a typical American might say it, but instead as a french person might say it...ALEACE, with the "I" sounding like an "eeeee." Immediately, I began to give the ALICE guys more credit...after all, ALICE with a french accent is a totally groovy name.
The next surprise about ALICE is that it has nothing to do with finding a Higgs boson. In fact, it really is an altogether different experiment from the CMS and ATLAS experiments. In fact, ALICE is not even that interested in the proton-proton collisions of the LHC (although it will still pay some attention to them)...instead, ALICE is interested in the other collisions that will be happening at the LHC, the lead ion collisions. These high energy lead ion collisions should allow the nuclear Physicists study something known as quark-gluon plasma which was only recently discovered and which is believed to have existed in large quantities just after the Big Bang.
Okay okay, you are saying. Where did quark-gluon plasma come from? Quark-gluon plasma in fact came from the nuclear Physicists last attempt to isolate quarks from protons and neutrons, and from their bond with the gluons. Such a feat has never been accomplished, but instead, when the quarks were as separate as they could be from all these particles, quark-gluon plasma developed instead of free quarks. Why? Well, that's a good question. Nobody knows.
Alright, so why should we care? Well, if quark-gluon plasma was all that existed immediately after the Big Bang as the scientists believe, then all matter had to have come from the plasma as it expanded and cooled. So, suddenly quark-gluon plasma appears to be extremely important in understanding the way that the Universe developed. Hopefully, after the quark-gluon plasma has been created, the ALICE scientists will be able to study what happens as the plasma cools. Oh yeah, and according to CERN's website for ALICE, to create such plasma, you only have to heat up the ions to "temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun." (See http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/ALICE-en.html). Luckily, the high energy of the collisions should do the trick.
Unfortunately, I was not able to go down into the tunnel to see ALICE but I was able to see where the ALICE detector had been lowered into its "Cavern." So, no hard hat, but just staring down into that deep, deep hole in the ground was enough to give me the chills anyway. I mean, just picture it yourself. You are standing at the edge of a hold that goes 100 meters underground...literally the edge of it. All there is between you and long, hard fall is one iron fence. Yeah, at least it was iron, but still...the feeling of vulnerability sure does take your breath away. Oh and I forgot, the bottom of this drop that seems to go to the center of the earth is sealed over with concrete. I'm really glad that iron fence was there.
Well, that's about everything for Day 4! But keeping checking this blog for more entries about Day 5, my final day at CERN!!!
-Carolyn
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