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Particle Odyssey : a Journey to the Heart of the Matter

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Particle Odyssey : a Journey to the Heart of the Matter The Particle Odyssey Professor Frank Close, OBE is a particle physicist and broadcaster. He spent several years working at CERN, home to the largest particle accelerator in the world. He is the author of a number of popular science books, including Too Hot to Handle and Lucifer’s Legacy (OUP 2000). Michael Marten is Founder and Director of the Science Photo Library, and author of a number of illustrated books, including The New Astronomy (CUP 2000). Dr Christine Sutton is a physicist and broadcaster, based at Oxford University. She is on the board of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2001 was awarded the European Physical Society’s first Outreach Award. The Particle Odyssey A Journey to the Heart of the Matter Frank Close, Michael Marten, Christine Sutton 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Frank Close, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton, 2002 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First edition published under the title The particle explosion 1987 This new edition first published 2002 in hardback First published as an Oxford University Press paperback 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0 19 860943 4 10987654321 Art direction: Richard Adams Associates Designed and typeset: Sam Adams Original photography: David Parker Diagrams and illustrations: Gary Hincks Photoshop: Cesar Pava and Paul Gleave/Science Photo Library Printed in Italy on acid-free paper Contents 1. The World of Particles 1 8. Colliders and Image Chambers 129 Cosmic Explorers 4 Electronic Bubble Chambers 133 Particle Physics Now 7 Synchroclash 136 A Journey to the Start of Time 13 New Particles, New Machines 140 The Antiproton Alternative 143 2. Voyage into the Atom 17 The Biggest Machine in the World 148 X-Rays and Radioactivity 18 Silicon Microscopes 150 The First Particle 24 All Kinds of Collider 153 Rutherford and the Atom 24 Inside the Nucleus 28 9. From Charm to Top 157 Splitting the Atom 30 Charmed Particles 158 The Tau 162 3. The Structure of the Atom 35 Bottom Particles 164 The Electron 36 Gluons 168 The Nucleus 39 The W Particle 172 The Proton and the Neutron 42 The Z Particle 176 The Photon 46 Unity 180 The Top Quark 182 4. The Extraterrestrials 49 The Discovery of Cosmic Rays 50 10. Future Challenges 187 The First New Particles 54 What Happened to the Antimatter? 189 Strange Particles 58 What is Mass? 192 Powell, Pions, and Emulsions 59 Does Quark–Gluon Plasma Exist? 193 Particles from Outer Space 62 What is the Dark Matter? 197 Do Neutrinos have Mass? 199 5. The Cosmic Rain 65 Is there a Theory of Everything? 203 The Positron 66 The Muon 69 11. Futureclash 207 The Pion 73 Particle Factories 209 The Kaon 74 Neutrinos – Going to all Lengths! 212 The Lambda 76 Particle Astronomy 214 The Xi and the Sigma 78 Cosmic Record-breakers 217 6. The Challenge of the Big Machines 81 12. Particles at Work 221 The Whirling Device 84 Proton Detectives and Neutron Special Agents 222 Man-made Cosmic Rays 88 The Reality of Antimatter 223 Glaser and the Bubble Chamber 92 Accelerators at Work 224 Strong Focusing 96 Pixels in Medicine 226 Spark Chambers 98 The Final Analysis 228 The Supersynchrotrons 101 Table of Particles 230 7. The Particle Explosion 107 Further Reading and Acknowledgements 234 The Neutral Pion 109 Picture Credits 235 The Neutral Cascade 110 Index 237 Antimatter 112 The Resonances 115 The Omega-minus 118 Neutrinos 120 Quarks 124 This page intentionally left blank Preface A little over fifteen years ago the three of us teamed up with the aim of producing a book that would show just how visual the world of subatomic particles can be. We brought together classic images of particle tracks in cloud chambers and photographic emulsions, bubble chambers and modern electronic detectors, and we mixed in pictures of leading personalities, from the 1890s to the present day, together with photographs of experiments old and new. The result – The Particle Explosion – proved a great success. But subatomic particle physics has had its successes too in the intervening years, and so we have put together a much-requested, new and updated version – The Particle Odyssey – with around 250 new pictures and some completely new chapters. In 1987, when the original book was first published, the particles that carry the weak force, the W and Z bosons, were brand new, and CERN’s Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) had not even started up. Now, LEP is no more – decommissioned at the end of 2000, after producing millions of Z particles and thousands of W particles. Elsewhere, the top quark and the tau neutrino have been discovered, completing a pattern of fundamental particles that first began to emerge in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the century has changed to the twenty-first, and the challenges in particle physics have changed too. The questions have changed from ‘what?’ to ‘why?’; from ‘what is matter made of?’ to ‘why is matter the way it is?’. The explosion of particle discoveries in the 1960s has evolved into an odyssey to explore the underlying relationships and symmetries that give rise to the Universe we observe. The Particle Odyssey seeks to bring the reader up to date, with images from the LEP collider, new ‘portraits’ of particles such as the top quark, and pictures of the latest generation of experiments that are asking ‘why’? Readers of The Particle Explosion will find parts they recognize, but also much that is new. We hope that all our readers – old and new alike – enjoy this new journey into the atom. Frank Close, Michael Marten, and Christine Sutton Oxford January 2002 Preface vii 1. The World of Particles The Executive Lounge at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, with its deep pile carpets, soft armchairs, Fig. 1.1 The basic building bricks of and panoramic view of aircraft manoeuvring, is a temporary oasis for business travellers. the Universe – the fundamental particles of matter – were formed in The bustle and noise of the concourse disappear once you enter the air-conditioned calm of the initial hot Big Bang. To learn this living exhibition of state-of-the-art technology. Here you can pause before your flight about these elementary constituents, to enjoy some of corporate America’s latest toys. Disregarding the computer screens with particle physicists reproduce the energetic conditions of the early their optimistic promises of ‘On Time’ departures, or the multitudinous channels of world- Universe with machines that wide television, you may seek out a glass booth where other travellers’ mobile phones will accelerate subatomic particles close not disturb your business. The booths contain fax machines, modem connections to the to the speed of light, through tunnels kilometres long. The machines are Internet for your PC, and optical-fibre links to a mainframe computer should your portable monuments to modern technology. not be up to the task. If you’re a television news reporter, you can even make your Electromagnets guide the particles presentation live through a satellite hook-up. repeatedly on circular paths through an evacuated ‘beam pipe’, part of All of these, and much more to which we give barely a second’s thought, are the result which is just visible in the bottom of a discovery made more than a hundred years ago by a bowler-hatted, bespectacled right corner of the picture. The beam Victorian gentleman, Joseph John (‘J.J.’) Thomson, in Cambridge, England. Every day, pipe passes through regions of electric field that provide the among the hordes passing through O’Hare, there are always a few of his modern accelerating power. This view shows successors, members of the world-wide network of particle physicists. Take the trio sitting the tunnel of the Tevatron at the opposite you. They happen to be members of a team whose discoveries have recently Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), near Chicago, completed a chapter in the history of science. They work on an experiment at Fermilab, the as it looked at the time of the 6 km circumference particle accelerator sited 50 km from O’Hare. Their experiment takes discovery of the top quark in place in America, their home universities are in Europe, and their experimental colleagues 1994–95, when it contained two rings of magnets. The red and blue and collaborators are based in 17 states of the USA, six countries in Europe, plus Canada, magnets (the upper ring) form the China, Korea, and Japan.
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