The Insane Breakthroughs Happening at CERN!

Summary

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has been at the forefront of groundbreaking scientific discoveries for decades. Founded in 1954, CERN unites scientists from around the globe to explore the intricacies of particle physics. This captivating exploration dives into CERN's history, impressive technology like the Large Hadron Collider, and current projects aiming to understand the fundamental components of the universe. From antimatter studies to insane energy releases during particle collisions, CERN exemplifies scientific collaboration at its peak. Discover how CERN's innovative experiments continue to push the boundaries of our universe's understanding.

Highlights

• CERN accelerates particles to unimaginable speeds to unlock universe's mysteries 🌌.
• The Large Hadron Collider can make particles travel at 99.999991% the speed of light 🚀.
• CERN plans a new accelerator reaching 100 TEVs, seven times current capabilities 💪.
• Antimatter studies at CERN provide glimpses into the universe's early days 🚀.
• Particle collisions at CERN produce energy equivalent to atomic bombs 💥.
• CERN's Large Magnet Facility is pioneering superconducting technology innovations ⚙️.
• A potential new communication system using neutrinos could outrun Starlink 🚀.

Key Takeaways

• CERN accelerates particles to near-light speeds to study fundamental particles of the universe 🌌.
• The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine ever built by humans 🏗️.
• CERN's research extends beyond particle physics, impacting technologies like superconductivity ⚛️.
• Amazing scientific collaborations happen underground, shielded from cosmic rays 💥.
• Future accelerators at CERN promise even more mind-blowing discoveries 🚀.
• The possible use of neutrinos for faster global communication could revolutionize the industry 📡.

Overview

Imagine a monumental scientific facility tucked away underground, where mind-boggling experiments reveal the universe's deepest secrets. Welcome to CERN, a collaboration of nations where scientists accelerate particles to near-light speeds! The European Organization for Nuclear Research was established in 1954 and has made history with its discoveries, including the elusive Higgs Boson.

At CERN's heart is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, operating deep beneath the earth’s crust. Here, particles are smashed together with unimaginable force, helping scientists unfold mysteries of the universe and leading to potential groundbreaking technologies, like superconductors, that could reshape industries.

What's next for CERN? Envision new accelerators unleashing even more energy or a communication breakthrough using neutrinos—that's right, using the tiniest subatomic particles zipping straight through the planet! CERN continues to foster scientific innovation and international collaboration, reaffirming its role as the beacon of particle physics exploration.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to CERN's Synchro Cyclotron The chapter discusses CERN's original Synchro Cyclotron, built in 1957 as the organization's first particle accelerator. It was initially designed to produce and study new particles, focusing on detecting the decay of pions and muons. By 1962, those experiments were completed, and the cyclotron was repurposed for various new experiments over the next 30 years. It featured a large magnetic coil that accelerated particles for research purposes.
• 00:30 - 01:00: CERN's Early Achievements and Purpose The chapter discusses CERN's remarkable achievements and its fundamental purpose since its inception in 1957. Highlighting the absence of modern technologies like CNC modeling at the time, it marvels at the precision and sophistication of the systems built. This historical perspective emphasizes CERN’s role in not only advancing scientific knowledge but also in fostering international collaboration for a better world.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Sponsorship Acknowledgment The chapter 'Sponsorship Acknowledgment' is a brief segment where the video credits its sponsor, Delete Me, indicating a sponsorship or promotional partnership.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Founding and Evolution of CERN CERN was founded in 1954 by 12 European countries with the goal of uniting scientists and sharing the costs associated with nuclear physics research. Initially, the focus was on studying atomic nuclei, but CERN's research expanded to high-energy physics, exploring subatomic particle interactions. Today, CERN serves as a global hub for scientific collaboration, boasting 24 member states and numerous international partnerships. Over the years, CERN has remained at the forefront of groundbreaking scientific discoveries, consistently pushing the boundaries of research.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Underground Layout and Significance of CERN The chapter delves into the complex underground layout of CERN, likening it to an iceberg where the majority of its structure is hidden beneath the surface. Most facilities, including accelerators and detectors, are positioned in a network of deep tunnels. This underground setup is crucial for protecting experiments from cosmic rays and various environmental interferences. Despite the subterranean concentration of activities, CERN's operations are also visible at eight primary sites.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Study of Elementary Particles and Standard Model This chapter delves into the infrastructure and operations behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), focusing on its physical construction and logistical aspects. It highlights the 27 km circumference of the LHC, detailing how it includes surface buildings, experimental halls, and access points to the underground facilities. The narrative describes the transportation methods used for installation materials, emphasizing the role of the overhead crane in transporting materials to the underground zones. Specific depth measurements are discussed, illustrating the 70 to 71 meters depth at certain access points, while noting that the LHC tunnel itself reaches a depth of 100 meters. All these details frame the operations and setup required for the study of elementary particles using the LHC.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Importance of Personal Data Privacy The chapter discusses the importance of personal data privacy, although the transcript provided seems unrelated to the topic. It talks about the LHC tunnel at CERN, its inclination, varying depths, and its purpose in studying particles, forces, and the origins of the universe. There appears to be a disconnect between the chapter title and the transcript provided.
• 05:30 - 06:30: Particle Acceleration Process at CERN The chapter titled 'Particle Acceleration Process at CERN' explains how particle acceleration at CERN involves smashing atoms apart by crashing particles into each other at high speeds. This process helps scientists study the fragments that result from these collisions, known as elementary particles, which are fundamental components of matter. The interactions and collection of these particles form what is known as the Standard Model in particle physics, which consists of 17 elementary particles.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Overview of LHC and Particle Collision This chapter gives an overview of the classification of particles, explaining the categorization into fermions and bosons, further breaking down into types such as quarks and leptons. The behavior of fermions is elucidated, including their combination into hadrons like protons and neutrons, which further form atomic nuclei. The chapter also covers the formation of atoms or ions through the combination of atomic nuclei with electrons, reaching into basic atomic structures familiar from a grade school level understanding, setting the foundation for more advanced concepts in the video.
• 07:30 - 08:30: Future Plans for a Larger Accelerator The chapter discusses the future plans for developing a larger accelerator. The focus is on topics that are often counterintuitive or not immediately obvious to people. An example given is the lack of awareness about how much personal information is exposed online. The chapter highlights the use of a service called Delete Me, which is a subscription service that helps remove personal information from online listings. The effectiveness of this service is demonstrated by the reduction in exposed data over time, as shown in quarterly reports.
• 08:30 - 09:30: Control Center at CERN (CCC) The chapter discusses the importance of protecting sensitive data and mentions the 'Delete Me' service, which has scanned over 2,300 listings to help reduce data exposure. It emphasizes that Delete Me offers family plans for comprehensive privacy protection and reminds users to be aware of how their data is being used, especially in free services where they might become the product being sold. The chapter encourages readers to join Delete Me to enhance their privacy and data security.
• 09:30 - 11:30: Antimatter Research at CERN The chapter titled 'Antimatter Research at CERN' discusses the operations of particle accelerators at CERN. It explains that there are 11 operational particle accelerators at CERN, which are interconnected rather than standalone units. The process begins with a hydrogen source in a linear accelerator. Each accelerator has its own distinct physics, client base, and serves as an injector for subsequent accelerators. There is a mention of the necessity of particle acceleration to disassemble particles.
• 11:30 - 13:30: Superconducting Magnet Facility Tour The chapter provides an overview of the processes in a superconducting magnet facility. It describes how hydrogen ions or protons start in linear accelerators, called Linacs, where they reach 87% of the speed of light. These particles are then moved to a circular accelerator called the Booster. Once there, they gain more acceleration and are transferred to the Large Proton Synchrotron for further speed increases. Eventually, they are directed into the 7 km long Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally into the 27 km Large Hadron Collider, known as the most powerful particle collider in existence.
• 13:30 - 16:30: Insights on Alice Detector The chapter discusses the Large Hadron Collider, known as the largest and most complex machine ever built by humans. It holds a Guinness World Record and operates at incredible speeds, sending trillions of protons racing around its accelerator ring 11,245 times per second at 99.999991% the speed of light, exemplifying the pinnacle of human engineering and scientific achievement.
• 16:30 - 18:30: Neutrinos and Future of Communication The chapter titled 'Neutrinos and Future of Communication' discusses the intricate processes involved in proton acceleration for high-energy experiments. The narrative describes the journey of protons as they are accelerated and prepared for collision. These collisions occur at experimental areas, providing significant insight due to the high energy levels involved. Each proton is accelerated to an energy of 70 electron volts (EVs), and two beams are directed to travel in opposing directions, ultimately colliding head-on. The combined energy during these collisions reaches 14 times the normal speed, showcasing the potential for groundbreaking research in particle physics and how this might inspire advancements in communication technologies, possibly involving the utility of neutrinos given their high energy dynamics.
• 18:30 - 20:00: Conclusion and Gratitude Towards CERN Team The chapter highlights the immense energy produced by the collisions at CERN, comparing it to the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, to give perspective on the strength of 14 TEVs per collision. The significance of what occurs after the collision is emphasized as crucial for scientific research, with the detectors playing a key role in the process. The chapter concludes with a personal note of gratitude and excitement about witnessing the detectors in person, a lifelong dream.

The Insane Breakthroughs Happening at CERN! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this is the original synchro cyclron built in 1957 and CERN's first accelerator cuts to life the purpose of the synchro cyclron is to produce and study new particles this thing was built to detect the decay of pions and muons but they had sorted that out by like 1962 so for the next 30 years it was able to be retrofitted to try out new experiments and with that huge magnetic coil accelerate particles
• 00:30 - 01:00 to8 the speed of light all the way back in 1957 what's amazing about this entire system is how they built this before CNC your computer modeling and look at the precision as you can imagine to build all this to maintain it to keep it up and to keep it relevant sir demonstrates how science can unite nations and contribute to a better world
• 01:00 - 01:30 well that was amazing this video is brought to you by Delete Me
• 01:30 - 02:00 cern was founded in 1954 by 12 European countries with a vision to unite scientists and share the growing cost of nuclear physics research initially focused on studying atomic nuclei CERN's research quickly expanded to higher energy physics exploring the interactions between subatomic particles today CERN is a global hub for scientific collaboration with 24 member states and countless international partnerships over the decades CERN has been at the forefront of groundbreaking discoveries pushing boundaries of our
• 02:00 - 02:30 understanding of the universe cern's layout can be a bit mind-boggling to grasp at first because it's a bit like an iceberg where most of it is hidden underground the majority of CERN's facilities especially the accelerators and detectors are located in a network of tunnels deep beneath the surface this is essential for shielding experiments from cosmic rays and other environmental interference while most of the action happens underground CERN's presence pops up at eight main sites or points around
• 02:30 - 03:00 the 27 km circumference of the Large Hadron Collider these sites house surface buildings experimental halls and access points to the underground facilities this is also the place where all the material that has to be installed is coming down so there is an overhead crane on the top which is lowering everything into this zone and then it will be transported over there we're at 70 m now roughly 70 m roughly 71 i think I saw the LC is at 100 m right the depth of the LC tunnel is not the same measured to the to the surface
• 03:00 - 03:30 so this has to do with the fact that first of all the tunnel is not really horizontal but is slightly inclined with four or 5° and then of course also the the surface is not even so depending on where you are at which point of the LHC tunnel the depth is between 50 60 m all the way up to almost 150 the closer you get to the Jura the deeper of course you have to go the main thing that they do here at CERN is study the little particles that make up our world the forces that keep them together and the origins of our universe you know basic
• 03:30 - 04:00 stuff remember when they taught us in school that atoms are made of electrons protons and neutrons well it turns out you can break those apart if you smash them together with enough force and that is what they do here at CERN they accelerate particles and make them crash into one another and break them apart and study the bits and pieces that remain the collection of all these bits and pieces or elementary particles and how they interact is what particle physicists call the standard model there are 17 elementary particles in the model
• 04:00 - 04:30 classified into different categories like firmians and bzons those are further divided into other types like quarks leptons and others when you bind firmians together you get hadrons like protons and neutrons for example when you combine hadrons you get atomic nuclei like helium nuclei or lead nuclei and when you combine atomic nuclei with electrons you get the atoms or ions we're more familiar with from there it's what we learned in grade school and that should be a pretty fundamental understanding of what we need to know for the rest of the video a lot of the
• 04:30 - 05:00 topics we cover are counterintuitive or not immediately obvious you know what's really not obvious how exposed your personal information is online it's why I've been a member of our sponsor Delete Me for two years now delete Me is a hands-free subscription service that'll remove all your personal information that's being sold online and it's not just a one-time scan just look at all these listings that have been reviewed each quarter and how the amount of exposed data is going down over time i just got my eighth quarterly report and
• 05:00 - 05:30 Delete Me has scanned over 2,300 listings and it's just amazing to see how the amount of data being exposed just keeps going down over time and remember delete me isn't just for you there's family plans so you can protect your entire family and keep all of their data safe because we all have a lot on our minds and your privacy probably doesn't come up very often it's why I let Delete Me stay vigilant and do all the work so I don't have to think about it have you ever heard the expression if something is free you're the product being sold so join Delete Me and save
• 05:30 - 06:00 20% on all plans with my code Ricky links in description huge thanks to Delete Me and you now back to the show you have to accelerate the particles to break them apart so you need a particle accelerator there are a total of 11 operational particle accelerators currently running at CERN and they're not just a bunch of separate accelerators everything here is connected so it all start with a hydrogen source in a lin we all accelerator have their own physics their own clients and also are injectors for
• 06:00 - 06:30 the other hydrogen ions or protons are initially shot out of the linear accelerators or linax at 87% the speed of light into another circular accelerator called the booster the booster accelerates them and injects them into the large proton synretron there they accelerate even more and are fed into the 7 km long super proton synretron after that they're fed into the 27 km long large hedron collider which is the largest and most powerful particle smasher in the world not to
• 06:30 - 07:00 mention the largest and most complex machine we as humans have ever built and I'm not just making that up they literally have the Guinness World Record at full speed trillions of protons will race around the large hydron colliders accelerator ring 11,245 times a second traveling at 99.999991% the speed of light so in all the other like the FPS is just a single
• 07:00 - 07:30 beam right because it's just accelerating and then from here it goes into the different directions and when we are we have accelerated and we are ready we will collapse the separation and the beam will collide in our four experimental area at this speed each proton has an energy of 70 EVs two beams of protons travel in opposite directions and smash headon on with an energy of 14 twice as much the highest energy
• 07:30 - 08:00 collisions on Earth to put that into perspective 14 TEVs per collision is so strong that by smashing just 32.5 microgram of hydrogen atoms you'd get the same amount of energy released by the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki but that's only half the story what happens after the collision is even more important because that's where the science happens and that's when the detectors come in these things are massive being able to see them up close is why I always dreamed about coming
• 08:00 - 08:30 here before that you should know that CERN is planning an even larger accelerator 91 km long that will reach a collision energy of 100 TEVs 7 times higher than the Large Hadron Collider that deserves a video all by itself and a follow-up so if you want to see that when that happens let us know below there's also one additional fact about CERN that will really surprise you and that could change how we transmit information around the world but we'll
• 08:30 - 09:00 leave that for the end welcome to the CCC so this is where we control all the accelerators at SE it's the central nervous system bringing together control rooms for all the accelerators the cryogenic distribution systems and the technical infrastructure the CCC was built in just 15 months as part of the large Hadron Collider to streamline operations and improve communication between the different accelerator teams the CCC is organized into four islands with a total of 39
• 09:00 - 09:30 operating tables each island is responsible for a certain set of machines and systems here we have the proton synretron back here this controls the booster and the PS and then if you come this way we have the IT which is the infrastructure this runs the cryogenics electricity cooling all the things that keep this place running and that's monitored here behind me then coming around this way this is the large Hadron Collider command center all these
• 09:30 - 10:00 screens up here you can see there's no beam currently running but this is where all the action would be for the LHC obviously really big and important has its own station and then finally over here this is the second biggest accelerator the super proton secretron which is this 7 km loop here and that lives behind me now one really cool fact is if you look on that wall you'll see all the champagne bottles now CERN is a science apparatus where some of the most amazing discoveries are happening and that isn't lost on them and they
• 10:00 - 10:30 celebrate they take opportunities to break major milestones discoveries and to celebrate all the wins and that's what that wall back there is i love that it's there's so much you can just feel the amount of energy and the people and this is kind of a downtime in a week or two when this run picks back up and the LC goes back online this place is going to be absolutely buzzing here's a fun fact before they built the CCC they invented the capacitive touchcreen in 1972 to control the super proton synretron in the first SPS control room
• 10:30 - 11:00 and this highlights CERN's contributions to technological advancement even beyond particle physics one of the most interesting areas of study here at CERN is antimatter so in the very early forming of the universe we had matter and antimatter and when they come into contact they annihilate each other that's why we're here at the antimatter factory now as far as factories go the outputs are pretty small but some of the most cutting edge research is happening here they were entering an area of
• 11:00 - 11:30 radiation now this is one of the places I most wanted to visit being a Dan Brown fan and having read Angels and Demons and knowing that this was actually happening in real life I had to go check it out okay so what you basically see here is the world's only factory for antimatter for anti-roton I have to be precise and antimatter is not some mysterious substance it's just a sort of mirror image of normal matter and if you think about transforming energy into stuff E=
• 11:30 - 12:00 MC² you basically every time you get a particle you get its mirror image its mirror particle which has obviously the opposite charge but also a few other symmetric properties now this process can also go the other way around where you contact matter with antimatter and that annihilates the antimatter and so anytime you have antimatter around us it'll annihilate with normal matter it will transform into energy which is why there's no antimatter here except when we make it we make it by this process of producing pairs of matter and antimatter
• 12:00 - 12:30 uh that's easy to do we can get something like a few tens of millions of anti-rotons in a single burst by using CERN's accelerator infrastructure and then we use this big accelerator here to slow it down to pedestrian speeds like a hundth of the speed of light and then it's investigated by six different experiments and the reason why these experiments are all looking at antimatter and trying to study it very precisely is that when you go back to the big bang matter and antimatter must
• 12:30 - 13:00 have been formed in equal amounts but if you look at the universe now there's no antimatter whatsoever so there must be a difference between the two but this difference is not part of our standard model of physics we don't know where this difference is coming from where it might be hiding and so if we're looking for a difference between matter and antimatter that could have explained how all the antimatter that was formed at the moment of the big bang could have disappeared we have to find this difference somewhere without knowing where so we're looking everywhere everything that we can think of
• 13:00 - 13:30 measuring about antimatter we do here so we measure the mass the charge the lifetime the magnetic moment of individual antiparticles but also the interaction between matter and antimatter which can be a electromagnetic interaction it can be the weak interaction the strong interaction or the gravitational interaction we are looking at the anti-roton trap this is what they used to transport anti-roton different facilities for example and this pretty much is what
• 13:30 - 14:00 they had in Angels and Demons this would have been the device that briefcase that they were running around with it's a little different than what I anticipated but of course it does make sense you've got electromagnets to keep it from hitting the walls and annihilating it's got to be cooled down high vacuum all the rest but if trapped successfully theoretically it should last forever but this is really important especially because as you can see here the level of electromagnetic interference and buzzing and the noises is just so high that they couldn't do more fine-tuned research
• 14:00 - 14:30 here so the idea is that they could produce anti-rotons store them in this trap and then transport them around the country or the world for further research at other facilities but this right here is straight up angels and demon stuff we are in the large magnet facility at CERN and here is um where we do production of the magnet and maintain of the magnet the LMF played a key role in assembling the LH series dipole magnets
• 14:30 - 15:00 which are essential for bending the path of particles in the accelerator so what what's the material choice for superconducting magnets uh for the actual magnet in the accelerator we have this one this one is nobium titanium is a ductile material uh all the magnets in the accelerator now are done with this one it's a really good material and it's ductile so we can use it quite well it doesn't need a reaction so as soon as uh we have it we can make the coil something similar to that already with
• 15:00 - 15:30 the cable with the insulation and then we cool it down when you cool it down it's already super conductive to give you an idea of why superc conductivity is so important for particle physics look at this this coil can carry 16,000 amps to do that without superc conductivity look at this this is what you would need this heap of copper so where you see this currently in the magnet design you can just imagine what that would look like if you had to
• 15:30 - 16:00 replace it with this and this also just makes everything more complicated you can imagine how much bigger it would all get that's pretty wild i'm used to like you know sizes for home like 200 amp services like two watt wire i mean this just one of these would be unimaginable and to deal with that that's why superconductivity is awesome this is nobium titanium and but like the one that look like bit like copper it's
• 16:00 - 16:30 nobium titin is the new one the problem that we have with this cable is that we are going like these are pieces of nobium treat reacted and if you try to just do like that they they they broke so we need to build coil with this material that it's really really brittle but if we switch to tritinium once reacted is like that so we cannot have a coil if the cable is already reacted we need to do the coil before and then
• 16:30 - 17:00 react in a coil shape so without that step it wouldn't be super conductive no as soon as it becomes super conductive becomes very brittle and and then to give mechanical stability we have impregnation so we put the raisin to have mechanical stability but also electrical insulation because uh this one it's really nice because we have the insulation electrical insulation already on the cable but if we uh bring this at 650° it's burning completely how does the stronger magnetic field then give
• 17:00 - 17:30 you higher energy right is it is it the focusing it's focusing uh it's it's the shape that um is the shape of the beam if we want the beam to collide and have higher luminosity uh it's like the beam is like at the size of an air and so if you want to uh collide them you need to take two hair and collide not super easy then from the collision when we have more we have more data and it's uh
• 17:30 - 18:00 easier to study the phenomenon than so when we have higher probability of collision that is the oven it's right there we cannot get uh closer but it's like that's the oven for the impregnation it's go actually to 900° but we used to up to 650 for uh for the coil what's being impregnated here I'm sorry I just want to make Uh in in this oven here we have the cable not superc conductive that is
• 18:00 - 18:30 reacted to become super conductive oh okay okay this is phase one and is this on the traditional cable the no this is on the nobium treat is it the new one this is the new one all the coil we are doing is our new cable okay so you've actually solved the problems and you're actually already manufactured yeah yeah yeah no no this is a magnet with that coil and is the uh we are 80% on the series so this uh this magnet are
• 18:30 - 19:00 working we tested them all of them and they're so this research happens here you're manufacturing it here yes like the first stage was smaller magnet not 7 m but one and then now we are at 7 m what you can see here this is all real components so these are the superconducting cables you see which are
• 19:00 - 19:30 they are coming it's it's like if I make a circuit with several coils I do like this you know so in the middle what is connecting them is the cable as well superc conducting cable so this is uh the cable traveling all along and then it's coming to a quadropost to be connected so these are the power converters here behind uh of course this is nothing because they took black and they are optimizing still up to the last moment these are bigger connectors these
• 19:30 - 20:00 connectors at 20,000 when you are working with copper you see how much copper you need and then you remember the conductor this is also conducting 20,000 so you see visually this huge difference and this is a conductor that is uh including also the water cooling so this is the entrance of the water oh and this is a a copper cable because in the room temperature you have to connect somehow to your power converter and here we have not we decided this connection
• 20:00 - 20:30 to do it in the rigid copper so this is a a rigid copper bar so 20 kilo you need all this copper it's just configured in another diff in a different way so that was a conductor water cooled cable this is a water cooled buzz bar as we are calling so this is the input of 20,000 amps coming in exactly and you can just kind of get a sense of the scale the size look at these bus bars look at the look at the heft of this and how many of them that you need right you have four discrete bus bars feeding through and
• 20:30 - 21:00 this is actually a really nice visual cuz it kind of shows you then can look at the size of this coming in and finally down to the link so this is the superconducting link that we had talked about before it's um cooled cryogenically but it's not as cold as it's not the 1.9K like we need for the uh for the magnets it's closer to 40k but superconducting and it can be that small you notice that the this this
• 21:00 - 21:30 superconducting link is kinkedked it runs along in a kind of a zigzag pattern the reason is from room temperature to the superconducting state that's a 300°ree Celsius drop in temperature and when that happens this entire link would shrink by maybe half a meter one and a half ft in size so you couldn't just have a straight pipe because it would contract and actually snap off so you have to build in that room for linear uh thermal expansion so I mean the benefits in terms of just the amount of copper
• 21:30 - 22:00 the material the weight savings that's why it's really interesting for things like aviation would you really want to have that much copper to transport megawatts of power to electric motors or your uh powertrain or you want to go superconducting and make all the linkages super small and lightweight those benefits are going to be insane so this was here before the LHCB
• 22:00 - 22:30 experiment so the the previous collider setup uh back in the '9s and 2000s uh this was the detector at this location and uh they deemed it more beneficial to leave it in here to use as a tour rather than try and get all of these huge pieces of lead out 100 meters up if you tour Atlas and CMS they're like their detectors look like this but they're so large it
• 22:30 - 23:00 basically fills up the whole cavern so you don't even get to see much of it but this one you can go right up to it a lot of these lines are for low voltage power a lot of them are for high voltage power right and then a lot are data cables it's a complicated uh 3D Tetris puzzle or you want to maximize the amount of space that you're actually using to detect but you also need to route your cables these are the calorimeters um
• 23:00 - 23:30 they are meant to stop particles and measure the energy energy absorbed yeah essentially are big hunks of lead lead is the densest heaviest material we can have without getting radioactive particle flies in collides with the lead it showers releasing its energy and then we can detect that uh energy shower look at the thickness of that's the radiation wall from that yellow door
• 23:30 - 24:00 that's how thick it is pure concrete and now we're on the actual beam side here's the individual detector components drawn on the picture the interaction point the collision point happens actually back in that concrete that's where our Veil sits you can actually see the beam pipe if you look in between these two uh the metal pipe going through the middle is the beam pipe back in the concrete where you
• 24:00 - 24:30 can't really see is our vertex locator you can see on the outside of our concrete that's our rich detector what we use to identify particles that come through the detector next step where that guy is working right now yeah you have our UT which stands for upstream tracker the big blue thing that's our magnets then after the magnets you have our sci-fi detector which stands for cintilating fibers it's another tracking detector and then there's the absolutely
• 24:30 - 25:00 awe inspiring Atlas Cavern home to the Atlas detector one of the two general purpose detectors here at the LHC it was here at the Atlas detector that they discovered the Higs Bzon aka the God particle on July 4th 2012 this was the missing piece of the standard model that explained how all other particles gained their mass peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics the following year after Atlas proved his theory right
• 25:00 - 25:30 okay this might be the most powerful visual of all so far all the places you've seen us those are large openings where the collectors are where all the detectors are where all the actual work happens but the 27 km this is what it mostly looks like in between and this is an area that we can never actually access this is a mockup to give you a sense of the scale this is how big the tunnel is and this this is the beam right here excuse me have you seen Alice yes it's
• 25:30 - 26:00 over there that's not Alice what is it the study of the lead iron collisions needs an enormous three-dimensional digital camera that surrounds the collision point this is the Alice detector it records the direction and energy of particles emerging from a collision by analyzing millions of collisions and comparing them with theoretical models we can learn more about the properties
• 26:00 - 26:30 of this primordial state of matter so we're just a few weeks too late and now they're preparing for the next run and if the doors are closed we're not going to be able to see inside but this is what it would look like if we had seen it the doors open all the detectors and everything else on the inside and it's all happening right there behind us underneath all this concrete spectrometer wow so you can see the dipole the blue one to bend positive and negative particle and these are the
• 26:30 - 27:00 several we call them station so the layers of this gas field detector inside that tube you have the beam pipe that is a shield again there you have the concrete this is to shield in case there is an unstable beam that you don't want to put your uh detectors so this is an actual event from the 18th November 2022 from one collision you can see that here you have the collision point and all the particles coming out you see the
• 27:00 - 27:30 amount of particles produced in a lead collisions and here these towers represent the energy released in the calorie meter so you already have a first idea of how much energy the particle has and here you can see that there is the other absorber and only muon passing by in the new spectrometer so there would be muons going all over but this is the the cone of muons that we could detect here
• 27:30 - 28:00 so here you have the beam pipe the real beam pipe is made of berillium but berillium is toxic so this is not burillium so you have to imagine that the collision between either protons protons or lead lead heavy ion in general happens here in the center and then you have several layer of several detectors why different detectors why different technologies because we don't have one single technologies that tell us all the information that we want to know you need to uh combine the
• 28:00 - 28:30 information between the different subdetectors so that's one it's the old inner tracking system of Ellis it was working during round one and round two you see here cuted in order to to look inside of course this was also covered but again we cut it so you can see a bit the first thing that you can observe is that this beam pipe is bigger than the one I showed you every time we do an upgrade we try to go closer and closer and closer to the collision point because we want to be as precise as possible so we need to go
• 28:30 - 29:00 closer in order to better reconstruct it now there is one thing in the diagrams that I've shown you before that I didn't fully understand remember this diagram it's got a little arrow that points to the southeast labeled CNGs which stands for CERN to Grand Sasso i didn't think much of it until now uh I thought it was just a building on site called Grand Sasso but I looked for that building and there wasn't one then I realized it's the only line of the entire image that ends in an arrow and not a flat black bar and that's when I realized that it
• 29:00 - 29:30 says nutrinos now nutrinos are the tiniest little subatomic particles you can imagine they're tiny and neutral so almost nothing can stop them i looked up Grand Sasso and it turned out to be a massive in the Apene Mountains in Italy and I thought that was a typo but actually it's entirely correct the large hadron collider at CERN generates a beam of nutrinos these things are so small they'll go through lead walls and mountains like it was nothing the beam is pointed in a straight line at a lab
• 29:30 - 30:00 in Italy 732 km away because of the Earth's curvature it goes the entire trip through the rock 11.4 km below the surface at its deepest point now why does this matter because nutrinos traveling at almost the speed of light could travel in a straight line from one point on Earth to any other right through the core without having to go around it's a much shorter route and in theory we could develop a communication system using nutrinos that transmits data much faster than any underwater
• 30:00 - 30:30 fiber optic cable or any low earth satellite system constellation like Starlink simply because of the shorter distance now of all the incredible research science and engineering breakthroughs happening here at CERN this could be the one that has the most potential for commercialization communications is a multi multi-billion dollar industry and this could be something that we might see on the horizon so this trip has been incredible we've learned so much and I want to just thank the team at CERN for this access and this privilege of a lifetime to come
• 30:30 - 31:00 see everything and if you thought this was all cool check out this video next until next week I'm Rick Tua Vinci thank you so much for watching