Friday, January 15, 2010

LHC Colliderscope: Witness to creation



The building you see in the video above is the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and the light show blinking across its facade depicts tracks of subatomic particles born in energies approaching those at the creation of the universe occurring in close to real time 175 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

There, in CERN's Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment, protons traveling close to the speed of light are being smashed together, releasing enormous concentrations of energy that in turn give birth to new particles. The new particles travel through ATLAS's Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT), a detector composed of 500,000 detector straws that signal when a charged particle passes through.

Full article here ....

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