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Post Higgs, Cern turns spotlight on dark
matter
Monday July 09, 2012 08:59:28 AM,
IANS
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London: Post Higgs
boson's discovery, touted as the biggest leap in physics,
scientists at CERN are preparing to turn the spotlight on dark
matter.
Physicists believe dark matter which binds the universe, makes up
84 percent of all matter and is everywhere, but it has never been
seen as it does not produce or reflect light.
Scientists hope that a 10-fold boost to the power of particle
beams being smashed inside Cern Large Hadron Collider will allow
them to create and detect dark matter. The LHC is expected to
receive a 1.2 billion pound upgrade for this purpose, the
Telegraph reports.
Although there is still much work to be done on the Higgs boson,
the milestone has left many at Cern worried that the public and
funders will feel their work is now complete. But other
experiments will continue until the end of this year, when the LHC
will close for 20 months for repairs.
The LHC works by smashing protons, subatomic particles to produce
temperatures of more than four trillion degrees Celsius, 250,000
times hotter than sun's core.
Detectors around the ring identify the debris thrown out from
these collisions. Scientists hope that the 2020 upgrade, dubbed ]superLHC
, will let them see some of the rarest particles of all.
Phil Allport of the University of Liverpool, UK lead for one of
Cern detectors, ATLAS, said: "It will allow us to greatly extend
the reach to search for new physics as well as make some very
precise measurements, for example, to potentially address the
nature of dark matter. Essentially we will be looking for a major
imbalance in the particles being emitted after a collision."
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