Re-Creating the Big Bang In a Laboratory (actually two labs)
The Big Bang was the Birth of the Universe
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Vanderbilt Intellectual Sampler Prof. Charles F. Maguire Department of Physics and Astronomy Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37215
Born on December 20, 1944 in The Bronx, New York City Crucial Battle of the Bulge date in WW II, Anchor Baby First generation American, parents were Northern Ireland immigrants Father crossed the Canadian border into the US illegally in 1933
Attended schools in NYC area until 21 (St. Barnabas elementary and Mount St. Michael HS in The Bronx, Iona College in New Rochelle) Graduate school in Nuclear Physics at Yale University, Ph.D. 1973
Married to Roberta Maria DeCarlo in Yale Chapel on October 2, 1971 Roberta was a school teacher in New Haven area, and she likes Osher classes Cannot be here today as she has other business to do (will show her picture)
First job as a post-doctoral research associate in Berkeley CA, 1973-1975 Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt in September 1975, Full Professor in 1988 Questioned as suspected IRA terrorist by French police at Strasbourg airport, 1990 but talked my way out it of in French, with the help of valid French documents
Currently director of a large physics data analysis computer center at Vanderbilt Serves the needs of the 3000 person CMS collaboration at the LHC in Geneva Planning to retire in August, 2017, and return to France a few more times February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt2 Are You in the Right Class?
This (will discuss in detail on slide 13)
The Birth and Aging of the Universe February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 3 Not This: The birth of successful and wealthy acting careers on television
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 4 Still speaking of birth, here is the answer to “Where is Roberta today?”
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 5 Ava Victoria Alvarado Born February 24, 2016 at 1:51 PM EST Held by her grandmother, Roberta Maguire
Ava Victoria Alvarado At 3 hours old and 9 days late
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 6 Ava Victoria Alvarado 8 lbs and 3.5 oz, one hour old Held by her mother, Maria Maguire
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 7 The Original Big Bang on Television Yes, it was televised Before cable TV, there were television antennae on roofs
Television “snow” What you saw in the 1950s when your 13-channel dial was set to a channel not in use in your city Lucy and Ethel adjust their TV antenna
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 8 The Early Evidence for the Big Bang (1920s) The Universe appeared to be expanding Far away stars and galaxies were seen to be moving faster than nearby stars
Hubble’s Law The speed of a distant star or galaxy increased linearly with its distance from Earth
The Expanding Universe
Run this picture backwards February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 9 The Simple Model for the Big Bang (1920s) The Two Big Bang Assumptions The Expanding Universe 1) Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is the correct one for gravity and space-time 2) The universe looks the same in all directions: homogenous and isotropic
Run this picture backwards With these two simple assumptions to get the Big Bang it is inevitable that the Universe originated in a tremendously hot Hubble’s Law of ever larger explosion which we call the Big Bang receding stars and galaxy speeds is automatically Was there any direct evidence today? predicted The evidence was there, hiding in plain sight.
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 10 The Original Big Bang on Television You could have won the Nobel Prize in Physics if you had understood the origin of the snow on your 1950s TV set
Robert Wilson Arno Penzias
These two guys did win the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in 1964 February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 11 The Big Bang at Bell Labs: 1964
Penzias and Wilson were radio astronomers (!) employed by Bell Labs in New Jersey
They were researching a forerunner of microwave communication technology
Their horn antenna kept picking up unwanted noise which would never go away no matter where the antenna was pointed
They talked with the Princeton Physics faculty who grasped that this was Einstein’s CMB
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 12 The Cosmic Microwave Background From 380,000 years ago
Big Bang starts at 1030 Kelvin
After 380,000 years the universe cooled down to 3000 Kelvin The photons could escape finally, not interacting with matter The universe continued to cool down, until 2.7 Kelvin today February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 13 Some Real World Calibration Numbers 1) Physicists use the absolute temperature scale: Kelvin
2) Room temperature at 68o F is 20o C, exactly
3) To go from Celsius to Kelvin, add 273
4) So room temperature is 293 K (we don’t say degrees K)
5) Temperature is a measure of how much kinetic energy, or energy of motion, an object has
6) Physicists use electron-Volt (eV) as an energy unit
7) Room temperature (293 K) corresponds to 0.025 eV
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 14 The Cosmic Microwave Background Measured Today (Planck Satellite) http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/planck
The variations are transformed into The average temperature of precise data points (“multipoles”) the universe is 2.7 Kelvin These data points are predicted perfectly using General Relativity with parameters like the age of the universe, dark matter, etc.
The blue to red are ”false colors” indicating variations of a few millionths of a degree Kelvin in different parts of the sky February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 15 The Big Bang was a one-time only event
We cannot “see” before 380,000 years with electromagnetic radiation (light, etc.)
How then can we understand what happened in the Big Bang at earlier times?
Answer: recreate micro-Big Bangs in the laboratory, millions of times per second
High energy collisions of relativistic particles will produce such micro-Big Bangs. These micro-Big Bangs correspond to the Universe at just a few microseconds after it was born. At that time, the Universe was a Quark-Gluon-Plasma
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 16 Relativistic Heavy Ion Particles RHI n Relativistic – the speed is within 1% or less of the speed of light ”c”
n Heavy – any nucleus; in practice from silicon to lead
n Ion – must remove electrons from atoms in order to accelerate nuclei electromagnetically
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 17 The Structure of the Atom
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 18 Quark-Gluon Plasma Is Made by a Phase Transition
n If quark-gluon plasma is formed in a RHI collision, it will last less than 0.00000000000000000000001 seconds. (10-23 s)
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 19 A Familiar Phase Transition
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 20 RHIC - The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 21 RHIC - The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
A view from an Earth satellite
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 22 Collisions of Heavy Ions Contracted by relativity to the shape of needles
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 23 Recall: A Quark-Gluon Plasma Is Made by a Phase Transition That Needs Pressure and Heat
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 24 We Bring the Heat For Sure
n The temperature inside a RHIC collision can exceed 1,000,000,000,000 degrees above absolute zero (that’s one trillion Kelvin) n This is ten thousand times the temperature at the center of our sun. n This is the temperature that was present in the universe at a few microseconds after the Big Bang !
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 25 A collision between two gold nuclei in the PHENIX experiment
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 26 CERN Site
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 27 CERN Site
Yes. And no. It’s international.
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 28 The Detector: CMS
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 29 World’s Largest Digital Camera
200 m2 of Silicon strip detectors
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 30 The First Ever RHI Collisions at the LHC
200 mEvent2 of SiliconDisplay Taken on November 14, 2010 at 6:37 PM (Geneva) A central collision of Pb+Pb at 2.76 TeV/nucleon-pair lights up the CMS detector strip detectors
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 31 The LHC Computing Grid
The LHC Experiments will produce about 15 Million Gigabytes of data each year (about 20 million CDs!) The LHC data analysis requires a computing power equivalent to ~100,000 of today's fastest PC processors. The sytem works like an Electric Grid.
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 32 The LHC Computing Grid Vanderbilt is the main site for CMS-HI computing !
The Grid unites computing resources of particle physics institutions around the world
The World Wide Web provides seamless access to information that is stored in many millions of different geographical locations
The Grid is an infrastructure that provides seamless access to computing power and data storage capacity distributed over the globe
Vanderbilt CMS-HI Computing Center 1800 CPUs, 4 Petabytes of disk
This is my “baby” My team, and $3 million DOE, made it
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 33 Summary of Recent Discoveries • The Higgs boson was discovered at the LHC, the last remaining particle predicted by the Standard Model of high energy physics (Announced July 4, 2012)
• A new phase of Quark-Gluon matter has been discovered in collisions of Gold nuclei at RHIC (2002-2016), and now additionally in the collisions of Lead nuclei at LHC (2010-2016)
• This new state of matter interacts strongly and exhibits motion as a nearly ideal fluid. The early Universe was a VERY HOT LIQUID
• The medium created at RHIC is very similar to that created at the LHC at although much hotter
• The precise properties of this medium are still under investigation
• What was before the Big Bang? “There was no then then” Gertrude Stein about Oakland: “There is no there there”
February 26, 2016 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute At Vanderbilt 34