We would like to remain neutral to keep science above politics, senior scientist at the CERN lab said
Photo: iStock_ In the wake of the energy crisis fuelled by the Russia-Ukraine war, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN, known for discovering the ‘god particle’ in 2012, has reduced its energy intake.
The laboratory has shortened the running period of their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by a month, Archana Sharma, senior scientist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, told Down To Earth.
Sharma was interacting with journalists on the sidelines of the India International Science Festival (IISF) in Bhopal.
“Energy is a big issue as the prices are going up. CERN consumes the energy of a town,” she noted. She added that we are shortening our runs as part of the mitigation measures.
LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with several accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles.
LHC was reignited after a three-year gap in July 2022. It was lit up for the first time in November 2008 and continued through 2013. The accelerator is best known for discovering the god particle or Higgs Boson in 2012.
Shortening the run can impact data collection, but researchers say their hands are full. “We have 10 years’ worth of data to be analysed,” Sharma remarked.
Further, the laboratory has signed an agreement with Électricité de France (EDF), a French multinational electric utility company, to manage further energy reductions.
According to the agreement, EDF may ask CERN to reduce its electricity consumption for 3-6 hours - once per day.
CERN gets 70 per cent of its energy from France and 30 per cent from Switzerland, the expert told journalists.
The war has also impacted research. In March 2022, the number of new research papers on experiments at LHC stood at zero, according to the Guardian.
This stemmed from a lack of agreement on how to list Russian and Belarusian scientists and institutes in studies, the website added. As a result, there’s a temporary pause on publications.
Papers are being uploaded on a preprint server, where research is not vetted for accuracy.
“A lot of scientific work was done by our Russian colleagues, which cannot be neglected. We have been debating for one year now on how we acknowledge the work done by Russian scientists. We would like to remain neutral to keep science above politics,” Sharma told DTE.
She added that they would be coming up with a policy on publications “very soon”.
CERN has proposed to develop a Future circular collider (FCC), a successor to the current LHC. The existing facility is expected to work through 2040.
“FCC is being dreamt to be 100 km circumference, which will go along the countryside of Switzerland and France,” Sharma highlighted.
The LHC has a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets. “FCC’s energy needs will be multiplied several times than the current one, and so will the funding,” she said.
The team of experiments are currently conducting feasibility studies. This entails identifying where a beam pipe can be placed and studying terrains to avoid drilling into a lake, for example. Geneva is full of lakes and valleys, according to the expert.
“We need to imagine what technologies will be needed to build the accelerator and what kind of magnets are needed,” she said.
The idea behind the proposed project, according to experts, is to discover new particles and go beyond the Standard Model of Physics.
The Standard Model of Physics is a theory that describes the most basic building blocks of the universe. It explains how quarks (consisting of protons and neutrons) and leptons (which include electrons) make up matter, according to the Department of Energy.
Following the discovery of the Higgs Boson, scientists observed the various ways in which the Higgs boson breaks down, Rohini Godbole, honorary professor, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, previously told DTE. “And the agreement with Standard Model predictions is impressive,” she added.
Higgs boson can decay into all the fundamental particles, but those into a final state with b quarks are the most dominant, she added.
However, finding results or effects that disagree with the standard model would be the harbingers of physics beyond the standard model theory, Godbole said.
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