The story
PROF. QUARK
“Ah, there you are. Professor Quark, pleased to meet you. You've just seen how it all began – and a hundred metres beneath Geneva we bring that beginning back, in miniature: in my particle accelerator.”
PROF. QUARK
“For fifty years the Standard Model has explained almost everything: quarks, leptons, three forces. Almost. About 85% of the matter in the universe is dark, and nobody knows what it's made of.”
PROF. QUARK
“I'm certain the answer is waiting at energies nobody has reached yet. For that we need a bigger ring. And then, I'm afraid, another one.”
PROF. QUARK
“The principle: two bunches of particles race around the ring in opposite directions, near light speed. They cross inside the detector – there you make them collide. Motion becomes new particles: E = mc².”
PROF. QUARK
“Every collision delivers data, which pays for upgrades. The particles you find pay for magnets and detectors. And the higher the beam energy, the heavier the particles that can appear.”
PROF. QUARK
“The big goal: the Higgs boson. Five of them and the council approves the next ring. First the FCC, then across Europe, around the Earth, around the Moon … all the way out to the heliosphere.”
PROF. QUARK
“And somewhere out there, beyond everything we know, particles are waiting that officially don't exist. We'll find them. Together.”
How things work
PROF. QUARK
“Below is the timing bar. The dot moves in step with the particle bunches – the bright field is the moment they cross right inside the detector.”
PROF. QUARK
“Tap inside the bright field and it's a hit: full data and a chance at new particles. Miss it and the beam only hits leftover gas in the vacuum pipe: a few bytes, nothing more.”
PROF. QUARK
“A hit. At 1 MeV, though, you only get photons – massless quanta of light. Not enough energy for matter yet.”
PROF. QUARK
“An electron weighs 0.511 MeV, and it never appears alone, always with its antiparticle, the positron. That makes 1.02 MeV, the minimum the beam needs. Einstein, worked out: E = mc².”
PROF. QUARK
“One more thing: hit several crossings in a row and you build focus – more collisions per hit. One miss or a long pause and it's gone.”
PROF. QUARK
“An electron – your first piece of matter, made from pure energy. Its counterpart, the positron, was predicted by Paul Dirac and actually found in 1932.”
PROF. QUARK
“Particles are the second currency here. Data pays for the beam, particles pay for the machines – electrons, say, pay for luminosity.”
PROF. QUARK
“Luminosity means denser bunches, so more collisions – even without you, 0.2 per second per level. Your own hits stay better all the same: triple the chance at anything from uncommon up.”
PROF. QUARK
“Now the machine runs even while you fetch coffee. Time for the next goal: the pion at 140 MeV.”
PROF. QUARK
“The pion is the lightest hadron – a quark and an antiquark bound by the strong force. Hideki Yukawa predicted it in 1935 as the glue of atomic nuclei.”
PROF. QUARK
“Pions. And muons next – the electron's heavy cousins, 207 times as massive.”
PROF. QUARK
“Both pay for the magnetic field. Stronger dipole magnets keep more energetic beams on track – every level gives ×1.3 data per collision.”
PROF. QUARK
“A detector is built like an onion: layer upon layer, each one seeing different particles.”
PROF. QUARK
“Innermost the vertex detector for short-lived heavy particles, then the tracker for charged ones. The calorimeter measures energy, and outermost the muon chambers – only muons get that far.”
PROF. QUARK
“Each level of a layer makes its particle family 12% more frequent. Start with the tracker: its first levels cost just a few pions, and you'll see real tracks in the event display.”
PROF. QUARK
“Quite a collection already. Particles come in six tiers: common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary – and mythic, the big ring goals. Every larger ring brings new, hypothetical particles.”
PROF. QUARK
“The codex tells you what each particle is and how it was discovered – and what you're still missing.”
PROF. QUARK
“At 125 GeV it gets serious: the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs predicted it in 1964; it was found in 2012 – right here at CERN.”
PROF. QUARK
“At the real LHC one appears per billion collisions. It's quicker with us, but it stays rare. The calorimeter helps: it sees the decay into two photons.”
PROF. QUARK
“Between us: when a bunch glows in colour, it carries something rare. Hit that crossing – or it's gone.”
PROF. QUARK
“Now it gets elegant: every particle oscillates at its own frequency, E = hν. In the upgrade menu, slide the beam wave exactly onto the J/ψ's and they come by the dozen. Its discovery in 1974 is still called the November Revolution.”
PROF. QUARK
“Cleanly measured. Good events get published, in four tiers: conference, paper, cover story, Nobel prize – every particle has a slot for each tier. Which tier an event reaches depends on its weakest measurement; better detectors and upgrades raise it. The codex shows what is already published.”
PROF. QUARK
“Every event you record is measured with seven values: mass, resolution, significance, √s, pile-up, rarity and trigger. You'll find them in the measurement log.”
PROF. QUARK
“Each value is compared with comparable events from the same phase of the game. “Better than 60%” means: better than 60 out of 100 comparable events.”
PROF. QUARK
“The weakest of the seven values decides: from 60% conference, from 80% paper, from 90% cover story, from 99.2% Nobel prize. One weak value holds back the whole event.”
PROF. QUARK
“Grey slots are still empty; they fill by themselves as soon as an event is good enough. For that, expand detector, resolution and trigger and keep pile-up low – tap a value to see which upgrade helps.”
