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Particle physics: journey from a napkin to a lab

Last Updated : 24 October 2016, 18:38 IST
Last Updated : 24 October 2016, 18:38 IST

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As I sat last month in the cafeteria at CERN, the nuclear research centre near Geneva, Switzerland, that is home to the Large Hadron Collider, I looked out at the expanse of tables and wondered what all those young physicists were talking about.

Judging from their enthusiasm, they had recovered from the summer’s ‘diphoton hangover,’ the nickname given to the disappointment that followed the coming apart, weeks earlier, of a striking observation — an excess number of photons hinting that some exotic new particle might be lurking behind the scenes, an encore to the Higgs boson.

Could it be a cousin of the Higgs, or a long sought particle of dark matter? The excitement led to a speculative bubble of papers seeking to explain what turned out to be a non-event. What had jumped out as a pattern in the data was apparently a mirage. A victim of its own success, particle physics has come to a turning point. For decades, the theorists have been calling the shots, predicting particles like the Higgs for the experimenters to find, plugging the holes in the cosmic puzzle. Now, with the pieces in place, in the form of the Standard Model, the theorists are hoping to push further, looking again to the experimenters to confront them with new things to theorise about.

As plates and utensils clattered around me, I thought of an earlier changing of the guard. In 1962 in this same cafeteria, a 32-year-old theorist named Murray Gell-Mann wrote a prediction on a napkin that helped set the course for the next half-century of research.

During the early decades of the 1900s, swashbuckling experimenters had run the show. Launching their instruments in balloons and carrying them to mountaintops, they brought back snapshots of cosmic ray particles that made no sense.

“Who ordered that?” Isidor I Rabi, a renowned theorist, famously said after he learned of the muon — a fat, short-lived cousin of the electron. Then came interlopers called pions, kaons, lambdas, sigmas and xis. With pencil and paper, Gell-Mann devised one, doing for physics what Mendeleev, with his periodic table of the elements, had done for chemistry. Sorting the particles into clusters of eight and 10, Gell-Mann came up with a framework he called the Eightfold Way.

Among the rows and columns of Mendeleev’s table there had been empty spaces — place holders for elements like germanium that would not be discovered for years. And so it was with the gaps in the Eightfold Way. If Gell-Mann’s math was right, there had to be a particle he called the omega minus. He described what to look for on a cafeteria napkin and handed it to a colleague, Nicholas Samios. Two years later, Samios, one of the great experimenters of his generation, discovered the particle at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. From then on, the theorists were ascendant.

With its bona fides established, the Eightfold Way led to quarks, gluons and ultimately the Standard Model, a chart with its own holes to fill. One by one, the experimenters obliged until the keystone, the Higgs, was put in place, discovered with the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. And that, for the theorists, led to a postpartum depression. Though now complete, the Standard Model lacks the elegance one might like in a well-made universe.

There are matter particles and force particles with masses ranging from zero  and near zero to the top quark, which is as hefty as an entire atom of tungsten — an element whose name, in Swedish, means ‘heavy stone’. The Higgs explains how particles acquired mass, but not why they were spit forth with such a hodgepodge of different values. Least satisfying of all, the Standard Model leaves out the most salient of forces, gravity, which is described by an entirely different theory.

As they lined up to bus their lunch trays, placing the dishes on a conveyor belt, I wondered for a moment about the fate of all those discarded napkins. All it might take is one, marked in pencil or ink with a unique scribble, to set particle physics off on its next adventure. Beneath our feet, particles collided silently in the tunnels, striking more sparks to puzzle over.

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Published 24 October 2016, 17:21 IST

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