Abingdonian 2018

15 www.abingdon.org.uk Michaelmas Term atoms are accelerated by supercooled Niobium-Tin magnets to 99.99999991% of the speed of light around a 27km tunnel, they make this journey 10,000 times a second. The protons are sent in packets so that an alternating magnetic field will boost their speed, one packet is sent clockwise and the other counter clockwise, they collide at set points where the detectors are placed. When they collide a lot can happen, through Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, energy and matter are related so the smashing of two packets of protons creates a lot of energy and subsequently the release of lots of different particles. Now the job of the massive detectors and the even bigger supercomputers is to try and figure out what happened. For every one billion billion protons that collide only 1000 Higgs particles are produced so the chance of observing one is very low. Luckily there are 600 million collisions per second to increase the chances. The downside of having so many collisions is that there is a huge amount of data that needs to be processed at the data centre, so much so that it has to export its data to other supercomputers. The astronomically large numbers associated with the LHC were awe-inspiring and truly it’s a marvel of modern technology. Other interesting things that we saw included the Geneva Plasma Physics Centre studying the stability of plasma for use in fusion systems helping to research how to effectively achieve nuclear fusion in power plants such as ITER and DEMO. The new Geneva Observatory is responsible for finding many new exoplanets and housing modern telescopes far more advanced than that of the telescopes found in the museum. The SeuJet hydroelectric dam helps contribute to produce 56% of Swiss electricity with the other two hydroelectric dams in the country. There is a heavy emphasis on being environmentally friendly, finding ingenious solutions to the problems of hydroelectric power, for example making stairways for beavers to cross between the two sides. As well as exploring the sites from Geneva we traveled to the city of Bern to visit the Einsteinhaus, the actual apartment that Einstein published arguably his three most important works: his paper on the photoelectric effect which won him the nobel prize in 1921, his paper on Brownian motion and finally his paper on special relativity which changed the way physicists looked at the world. Overall I learnt so much during our time in Switzerland. It is amazing how you can study the largest objects in space in the Geneva Observatory and only a few miles away you can probe the smallest objects in the universe at CERN. The history of science in Switzerland is rich and it continues to make history today as more work is being done at the University of Geneva in all areas of science. The trip has inspired me to further my understanding of particle and plasma physics and I would highly recommend visiting. Robert Smith, 6RP