The Knights Templar school toured the ISIS particle accelerator. Rowan Gray gives his account of the day.
The most famous, and largest, particle accelerator is in Cern but we are lucky to have one in Harwell, Oxford. So, "What is a particle accelerator?" I hear you cry. Simply, a particle accelerator is a machine that accelerates elementary particles, such as electrons or protons, to very high energies. With machines like this, scientists can hope to answer the big questions such as: what was our infant universe like? Or, what is dark matter?
To start the day, we were shuffled into a impressive lecture hall. There were no wooden pews and broad, square tables here, but rows of gently coloured seats lit by warm lights. The hall had a theatre-feel to it. After a quick introduction, we were promptly briefed on the history of particle accelerators by Dr X*. He taught us the journey particle physics had taken (from a tall steel pipe with a man in a box) to the 27 kilometre super synchrotron (the LHC in Geneva).
Afterwards, Dr Y* gave a lecture about the standard model, a periodic table of fundamental particles. He explained the four fundamental forces, the difference between bosons, leptons and force carriers, and how to detect gravitational waves.
In the tour we were shown the ISIS particle accelerator, as opposed to the diamond light source synchrotron. Both essentially do the same thing in the same way - accelerating charged particles using magnets. The difference is the diamond light source fires a beam directly at the target sample. ISIS fires protons at the element tungsten, these hit the nucleus of the atom, causing it to fragment. One could imagine this a bit like a firework,with trails in all directions.
Following this was an activity where we viewed computer generated images from Atlas, a machine which detects particles. We saw the particle’s trails and were tasked with finding certain decomposition of bosons into their fundamental components. As an extra challenge, the staff had hidden a Higgs boson decomposition among the snapshots. The group who “discovered” it first were to win a prize, which turned out to be LHC holographic viewers and postcards.
We returned to the lecture hall to be greeted by a humorous Professor Z* - who talked about his experiences at CERN and explained why the Higgs boson is so important.
The trip was truly eye-opening, we saw physics being applied rather than being studied theoretically. I may even go as far to say that I hope to work at a place like this someday.
* For security, real names are not used.