Collider in Russia accelerates particles in colliding beams (collider from the word collide, in translation - to collide). It is needed in order to study the impact products of these particles with each other, so that scientists impart strong kinetic energy to elementary particles of matter. They also deal with the collision of these particles, directing them against each other.
History of Creation
There are several types of colliders: circular (for example, LHC - Large Hadron Collider in the European CERN), linear (projected by ILC).
Theoretically, the idea to use the collision of beams appeared a couple of decades ago. Wideröe Rolf, a physicist from Norway, received a patent in Germany in 1943 for the idea of colliding beams. It was not published until ten years later.
In 1956, Donald Kerst made a proposal to use the collision of proton beams in order to study elementary particle physics. While Gerard O'Neill thought to take advantage of the accumulativerings to get intense beams.
Active work on the project to create a collider started simultaneously in Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States (Frascati, INP, SLAC). The first collider to be launched was the AdA electron-positron collider, built by Tushekavo Frascati.
At the same time, the first result was published only a year later (in 1966), compared with the results of observation of the elastic scattering of electrons at VEP-1 (1965, USSR).
Dubna Hadron Collider
VEP-1 (colliding electron beams) is a machine that was created under the clear guidance of G. I. Budker. Some time later, the beams were obtained at the accelerator in the United States. All these three colliders were test ones, they served to demonstrate the possibility of studying elementary particle physics using them.
The first hadron collider is ISR - proton synchrotron, which was launched in 1971 by CERN. Its energy power was 32 GeV in the beam. It was the only working linear collider in the nineties.
After launch
A new acceleration complex is being created in Russia, on the basis of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. It is called NICA - Nuclotron based Ion Collider facility and is located in Dubna. The purpose of the building is to study and discover new properties of the dense matter of baryons.
After the machine starts up, scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research inDubna near Moscow will be able to create a certain state of matter, which was the Universe in its very first moments after the Big Bang. This substance is called quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
The construction of the complex at a sensitive facility began in 2013, and the launch is planned as early as 2020.
Main Tasks
Specially for the Day of Science in Russia, the JINR staff prepared materials for educational events intended for schoolchildren. The topic is called "NICA - The Universe in the Laboratory". The video sequence with the participation of academician Grigory Vladimirovich Trubnikov will tell about future research that will be carried out at the Hadron Collider in Russia in a community with other scientists from around the world.
The most important task facing researchers in this field is to study the following areas:
- Properties and functions of close interactions of the elementary components of the standard model of particle physics with each other, that is, the study of quarks and gluons.
- Finding signs of a phase transition between QGP and hadronic matter, as well as searching for previously unknown states of baryonic matter.
- Working with the basic properties of close interactions and QGP symmetry.
Important equipment
The essence of the hadron collider in the NICA complex is to provide a large beam spectrum: from protons and deuterons, to beams that consist of much heavier ions, such as the gold nucleus.
Heavy ions will be accelerated to energy states up to 4,5 GeV/nucleon, and protons - up to twelve and a half. The heart of the collider in Russia is the Nuclotron accelerator, which has been operating since the ninety-third year of the last century, but has been significantly accelerated.
The NICA collider provided for several ways of interaction. One to study how heavy ions collide with the MPD detector, and the other to conduct experiments with polarized beams at the SPD facility.
Completion of construction
It was noted that scientists from such countries as the USA, Germany, France, Israel and, of course, Russia take part in the first experiment. Work is currently underway on NICA to install and bring individual parts into active working condition.
The building for the hadron collider will be completed in 2019, and the installation of the collider itself will be carried out in 2020. In the same year, research work on the study of the collision of heavy ions will begin. The entire device will be fully operational in 2023.
The collider in Russia is only one of six projects in our country that have been awarded the megascience class. In 2017, the government allocated almost four billion rubles for the construction of this machine. The cost of the basic construction of the machine was estimated by experts at twenty-seven and a half billion rubles.
New era
Vladimir Kekelidze, director of physicists at the JINR High Energy Laboratory, believes that the collider project in Russia will give the country the opportunity to rise to the highestpositions in high-energy physics.
Recently traces of "new physics" were discovered, which were fixed by the Large Hadron Collider and they go beyond the Standard Model of our microcosm. It was stated that the newly discovered "new physics" would not interfere with the operation of the collider.
In an interview, Vladimir Kekelidze explained that these discoveries would not devalue the work of NICA, since the project itself was created primarily in order to understand exactly how the very initial moments of the birth of the Universe looked like, and also what conditions for research, which are available in Dubna, does not exist anywhere else in the world.
He also said that JINR scientists are mastering new facets of science, in which they are determined to take a leading position. That an era is coming in which not only a new collider is being created, but a new era in the development of high energy physics for our country.
International project
According to the same director, work on NICA, where the Hadron Collider is located, will be international. Because high-energy physics research in our time is carried out by entire scientific teams, which consist of people from various countries.
Employees from twenty-four countries of the world have already taken part in the work on this project at a secure facility. And the cost of this miracle is, according to approximate estimates, five hundred and forty-five million dollars.
The new collider will also help scientists conduct research in the fields of new matter, materials science, radiobiology, electronics, beam therapy and medicine. ExceptIn addition, all this will benefit Roscosmos programs, as well as the processing and disposal of radioactive waste and the creation of the latest sources of cryogen technology and energy that will be safe to use.
Higgs Boson
The Higgs boson is the so-called Higgs quantum fields, which appear with necessity in physics, or rather, in its standard model of elementary particles, as a consequence of the Higgs mechanism of unpredictable breaking of electroweak symmetry. Its discovery was the completion of the standard model.
In the framework of the same model, it is responsible for the inertia of the mass of elementary particles - bosons. The Higgs field helps to explain the appearance of an inertial mass in particles, that is, carriers of the weak interaction, as well as the absence of mass in the carrier - a particle of strong interaction and electromagnetic (gluon and photon). The Higgs boson in its structure reveals itself as a scalar particle. Thus, it has zero spin.
Field opening
This boson was axiomatized back in 1964 by a British physicist named Peter Higgs. The whole world learned about his discovery through reading his articles. And after almost fifty years of searching, that is, in 2012, on July 4, a particle was discovered that fits this role. It was discovered as a result of research at the LHC, and its mass is approximately 125-126 GeV/c².
Believing that this particular particle is the same Higgs boson, helps quite good reasons. In 2013, in March, various researchers from CERNreported that the particle found six months ago is actually the Higgs boson.
The updated model, which includes this particle, made it possible to construct a quantum renormalizable field theory. And a year later, in April, the CMS team reported that the Higgs boson had a decay latitude less than 22 MeV.
Particle properties
Just like any other particle from the table, the Higgs boson is subject to gravity. It has charges of color and electricity, as well as, as mentioned earlier, zero spin.
There are four main channels for the appearance of the Higgs boson:
- After the fusion of two gluons occurs. He is the main one.
- When pairs WW- or ZZ- merge.
- With the condition of accompanying a W- or Z- boson.
- With top quarks present.
It decays into a pair of b-antiquark and b-quark, into two pairs of electron-positron and/or muon-antimuon with two neutrinos.
In 2017, at the very beginning of July, at a conference with the participation of EPS, ATLAS, HEP and CMS, a message was made that noticeable hints had finally begun to appear that the Higgs boson was decaying into a pair of b-quark- antiquark.
Earlier, it was unrealistic to see this with your own eyes in practice because of the difficulties with separating the production of the same quarks in a different way from the processes on the background. The standard physical model says that such a decay is the most frequent, that is, in more than half of the cases. Opened in October 2017reliable observation of the decay signal. Such a statement was made by CMS and ATLAS in their released articles.
Consciousness of the masses
The particle discovered by Higgs is so important that Leon Lederman (Nobel laureate) called it the God particle in the title of his book. Although Leon Lederman himself, in his original version, proposed the "Devil Particle", but the editors rejected his proposal.
This frivolous name is widely used in the media. Although many scientists do not approve of this. They believe that the name "champagne bottle boson" would be much more appropriate, since the potential of the Higgs field resembles the bottom of this very bottle, and opening it will definitely lead to the complete draining of many such bottles.
