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A puzzle inside the puzzle




Particle experiments are sometimes compared to the act of smashing two Swiss watches together in order to examine how they are constructed. But it is actually much more difficult than so, because the particles scientists look for are entirely new 0151 they are created from the energy released in the collision.

According to Einstein’s well-known formula E = mc², mass is a kind of energy. And it is the magic of this equation that makes it possible, even for massless particles, to create something new when they collide; like when two photons collide and create an electron and its antiparticle, the positron, or when a Higgs particle is created in the collision of two gluons, if the energy is high enough.

The protons are like small bags filled with particles — quarks, antiquarks and gluons. The majority of them pass one another without much ado; on average, each time two particle swarms collide only twenty full frontal collisions occur. Less than one collision in a billion might be worth following through. This may not sound much, but each such collision results in a sparkling explosion of about a thousand particles. At 125 GeV, the Higgs particle turned out to be over a hundred times heavier than a proton and this is one of the reasons why it was so difficult to produce.

However, the experiment is far from finished. The scientists at CERN hope to bring further groundbreaking discoveries in the years to come. Even though it is a great achievement to have found the Higgs particle — the missing piece in the Standard Model puzzle — the Standard Model is not the final piece in the cosmic puzzle.

One of the reasons for this is that the Standard Model treats certain particles, neutrinos, as being virtually massless, whereas recent studies show that they actually do have mass. Another reason is that the model only describes visible matter, which only accounts for one fifth of all matter in the universe.

The rest is dark matter of an unknown kind. It is not immediately apparent to us, but can be observed by its gravitational pull that keeps galaxies together and prevents them from being torn apart. In all other respects, dark matter avoids getting involved with visible matter. Mind you, the Higgs particle is special; maybe it could manage to establish contact with the enigmatic darkness. Scientists hope to be able to catch, if only a glimpse, of dark matter, as they continue the chase of unknown particles in the LHC in the coming decades.

(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/public..html)

Translate the sentences into Russian

a) Without this field the Standard Model would collapse like a house of cards, because quantum field theory brings infinities that have to be reined in and symmetries that cannot be seen.

b) Even if space were to be emptied completely, it would still be filled by a ghost-like field that refuses to shut down: the Higgs field.

c) If the Higgs field suddenly disappeared, all matter would collapse as the suddenly massless electrons dispersed at the speed of light.

d) This is apparently not the case in our world, so the particles must have acquired their mass from somewhere.

e) In order for the phase transition to occur, four particles were required but only one, the Higgs particle, survived.

f) One of the reasons for this is that the Standard Model treats certain particles, neutrinos, as being virtually massless, whereas recent studies show that they actually do have mass.

Banquet Speech

Read Peter Higgs’s banquet speech and say why it has taken such a long time to detect the Higgs Boson

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellences, Ladies and Gentleman.

It is a great honour for François Englert and me to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics and we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation.

It is a matter of great regret for both of us that Robert Brout did not live to share the Prize with us. The fact that it has been awarded just to the two of us implicitly recognizes his contribution, as is right. However, it should be remembered that the three of us were not the only theorists who contributed to the elucidation of what is called the BEH mechanism about fifty years ago.

The long time gap between the theoretical work and the award of the Prize is largely a consequence of the difficulty of performing experiments needed to detect the new particle that is an essential feature of our theory. More than thirty years of work on the development of accelerators, detectors and computer programmes have culminated in the claim made by CERN in July 2012. It was a great achievement by all the people involved, and we are grateful to them for enabling us to be here today.

 

(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/higgs-speech.html)


 

 

Unit 14

Blue Light-Emitting Diodes  

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 —
Press Release

October 7, 2014

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.

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