A group of 40 Israeli scientists joined their counterparts from around the world in Geneva this week to break ground in one of the largest scientific projects ever attempted: A recreation of the Big Bang that scientists believe began the universe. The Israeli team is in charge of collecting and analyzing the data for one of the main experiments, and includes scientists from all over the country.
Wednesday, the first day of the mammoth project, the Israelis telephoned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to inform him that progress was already “better than expected.”
One of the goals of the 20-year-long exploration into the beginning of time is to isolate the theoretical and heretofore elusive "Higgs Boson," a subatomic particle that physicists believe gives mass to every particle in the universe. So central is the Higgs Boson’s supposed role in the creation of the universe that scientists have nicknamed it the “G-d particle.”
In the experiment, the Israeli team hopes to recreate the conditions present one-trillionth of a second after the beginning of the proposed Big Bang.
The Israeli scientists are responsible for processing the data on the Higgs Boson, gathered by a cylindrical machine known as the Atlas particle detector. The Atlas detector is one of the key components branching off a giant subterranean ring called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which, with a circumference of 27 kilometers (17 miles), is the largest particle accelerator in the world.
The Collider is used, as its name suggests, to speed and then smash together opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. The LHC is the centerpiece of the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) laboratory, itself the largest internationally-built and staffed scientific complex in the world, with some 8,000 scientists from 80 countries and 500 universities present at any one time. The LHC straddles the border between France and Switzerland on the outskirts of the Swiss city of Geneva, and its ring crosses the border at four points.
Representing Israel were scientists from Tel Aviv University, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and Haifa’s Technion Institute of Technology. The particle accelerator has cost about US$10 billion and has taken over 14 years to build, with Israeli universities and the Israel Science Foundation contributing $12 million.
Professor Giora Mickenburg from the Weizmann Institute is heading the Israeli delegation. In a conversation yesterday with Prof. Mickenburg, MK Zevulun Orlev, Chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, said, "The fact that Israeli scientists are leading important research projects brings Israel great pride and much honor."
The detector with which the Israelis are working is a 150-foot-long structure, buried 100 meters (330 feet) below the ground, containing a series of ever-larger concentric cylinders around an interaction point where proton beams from the LHC collide.
Protons, which carry a positive electric charge, usually sit in the middle of an atom together with neutrons, and when orbited by negatively-charged electrons form the building blocks of every atom in the universe. For the Higgs Boson experiments and other projects underway at CERN, two proton beams in the LHC are accelerated in opposite directions to 99.999999% of the speed of light, the speed limit of the universe. As objects approach the speed of light their mass increases almost exponentially, and when two protons collide in the accelerator the particles, still invisible to even the most powerful optical microscopes, release about 14TeV, or about 14 times the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito.
In the experiment, the multinational team of researchers hope to recreate the conditions present one-trillionth of a second after the beginning of the proposed Big Bang, a sudden explosion of the universe from an unimaginably hot ball of matter the size of a quarter, which many scientists believe occurred about 14 billion years ago. The Big Bang is still referred to as a theory, and while physicists may never be able to "prove" it by replicating the creation of the universe, it is the most widely accepted scientific theory for explaining the origin of everything.
The Higgs Boson is one of many clues, such as additional dimensions, that the scientists will look for as they hope to gain a clearer glimpse into the defining moment of all creation.