Skillnad på LHC och RHIC ?

Men varför bygga en som är fem gånger så stark? varför inte ta det säkra före det osäkra och bygga en med 1,5 ellr 2 gånger större kraft än dom förra?

Och om vi inte hittade något intressant eller några svar med dom förra, varför skulle vi plötsligt göra det nu?

Högre energinivåer -> Större chans att hitta Higgs.

Vad är det som är så speciellt med denna higgs partikel? Har bara hört talas om den att den ska ha väldigt stor betydelse för forskningen.

Mer energi --> häftigare partiklar.

Aha, låter trevligt och säkert. Man skulle ju nästan tro att det är i Amerika skiten ska köras..

Och vad jag har hört så har de inte en jävla aning om vad som kommer att hända... förutom deras teorier ;P

Vad är det som är så speciellt med denna higgs partikel? Har bara hört talas om den att den ska ha väldigt stor betydelse för forskningen.

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Excellent thread, thanks for the time and effort you've put into it. You have a great way of explaining this stuff so that even a non-scientific dude like myself can grasp it.

You touched on the Higgs boson, and I've seen it mentioned in other LHC threads. Any chance you could give an explanation of what it is, and why we want/need to find it. I've looked in Wiki and a few other places, but none of them are as accessible as your posts.

This is the one to answer! It is a pretty tough one. Basically, chemists have this amazing piece of science, the Periodic Table. It is mostly unchanged for the best part of a century, save for the addition of a few more elements slapped on the end. It is the cornerstone of chemistry, and is a 'map' of sorts that tells a chemist how an element behaves, what it is likely to combine with, how heavy it is, etc.

Physicists have a similar map, called the Standard Model. This tells us what all the particles are, how they interact with one another, what their charge is, etc, and it does it very, very accurately. There is a problem though: We have no clue why particles weigh what they do. A good example is the proton. It's a hambeast, clocking in at 1000 times the mass of the electron. Inside it are 3 quarks, and each of these are pretty fat too. It is made up of two 'up' quarks, and one 'down' quark. The down quark is twice the weight of an up quark, but we have no idea why.

The standard model as we know it will tell us if we throw two protons together, out the other side will come a whole load of different quarks, forming mesons, hadrons, leptons, it'll tell us what charges they will have, what their spin will be, whether they're particles or antiparticles, but it has no method of saying how much they will weigh. It's not like something is missing from the model, like a hole that says 'put mass calculations in here', it's as if mass just isn't part of the standard model.

In the 60's, a professor at Edinburgh University, Peter Higgs, came up with a solution that permits this. The Higgs field. Particles that couple strongly to the higgs field are more massive, ones that don't are lighter. The maths comes out in a beautifully simple way, and that is often a sign in physics that the theory is one worth testing. Since then we've been looking for the higgs for years, but only now have we an accelerator powerful enough for it.

The Higgs boson is the 'messenger' of the higgs field. When we collide, create or annihilate matter, particles sit between the initial and final states, transmitting information about a certain property between these states. In the case of electric charge, that is the photon. For the weak force it is the W+,W- and Z bosons, and for the strong force it is the gluon. Essentially, they keep track of what everything is doing and make sure it all adds up on either side. Example: We have a neutral particle, and it decays to two charged particles. In this case we started with 0 charge. If on of the final particles is charged, the other must have the opposite charge in order to add up to 0 again in the final state. This is mediated by one of these messenger particles.

Men varför bygga en som är fem gånger så stark? varför inte ta det säkra före det osäkra och bygga en med 1,5 ellr 2 gånger större kraft än dom förra?

Och om vi inte hittade något intressant eller några svar med dom förra, varför skulle vi plötsligt göra det nu?