Prof. Kevin McFarlandUNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

24 JUNE 2009

Afternoon

MOVIE SUMMARY

• Antimatter is stolen from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and hidden in Vatican City.

• Countdown to Vatican annihilation begins.

• Race through Rome to avert death and destruction.

THE MOVIE’S WEAPON OF TERRORISM

• CERN scientists have produced anti-matter• To demonstrate literal truth of

Bible, that matter comes from light• As a form of energy

• Terrorists steal the anti-matter to use it as a bomb powerful enough to destroy the Vatican

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A CERN

Near Geneva, Switzerland

It is not top secret, and they do not own the prototype X-33 space plane used in the movie to fly Tom Hanks from Boston to Geneva in 1 hour

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PARTICLE PHYSICS AROUND THE WORLD

• CERN is the largest of worldwide particle physics labs• Fermilab (Chicago) is the largest in the United States

SLAC

Fermilab

Brookhaven KEK

IHEPDESYCERNTRIUMF

HOLLYWOOD’S CERN

• It appears to have much better architecture and a much larger budget for such niceties than the real thing

• Not revealed if Hollywood CERN canteen also sells beer

THE REAL CERN: More Utilitarian, No Less Awesome

SCIENCE AT CERN

• CERN is home to the LHC, soon to be the most powerful particle accelerator, with a ring 16.8 miles in diameter in a tunnel 330 feet underneath Switzerland and France

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Will smash particles into each other…

…to solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries

WHAT THE LHC DOES

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ANTIMATTER IN THE MOVIE

Suggest inserting “The God particle” movie clip

HOW TO RELEASE ENERGY

• The goal of the terrorists in the movie is to make an explosion to destroy Vatican city• 5000 Ton of TNT equivalent, we heard in our movie clip

• If you want to destroy something, you need to release a lot of energy in a small space• Energy/mass counts• Efficiency of release counts

HOW TO RELEASE ENERGY

Source of energy?1. Kinetic (bullets, catapault,

meteors) is impractical• Effective at hypersonic speeds

2. Chemical (gasoline, TNT) is “easy” but needs lots of material (thousands of tons)

3. Nuclear weapons win• Can unleash 10s of millions of

times more energy/mass, but in practice, not usually achieved

Object Energy (calories/g)

Type

Bullet (300m/s) 0.01 Kinetic

Meteor (30km/s) 100 Kinetic

Li-Ion Battery 0.1 Chemical

TNT 0.6 Chemical

Cookie 5 Chemical

Gasoline 10 Chemical

Hydrogen (fuel cell) 25 Chemical

Uranium 235 20,000,000 Nuclear

UNLEASHING CHEMICAL ENERGY

• A time-worn technique• The 5 kiloton (TNT) energy

release in the book would require kilotons of material

• This is why you may not drive a truck (or a fleet of trucks) to the door of St. Peter’s Basilica

Alfred P. Murrah Federal BuildingOklahoma City, OK, April 19, 1995

Fertilizer-Fuel Truck Bomb,2 Ton of TNT equivalent

UNLEASHING NUCLEAR ENERGY

• If you can acquire 20kg of 235U, it’s not too difficult to build a crude fission bomb• Probably 1-2% efficiency and

therefore 4-8 kTon explosion• The 235U bomb dropped on

Hiroshima, Japan, was 14 kTon• This is why the world places

a premium on making 235U a difficult substance to obtain

ANTIMATTER FOR TERRORISM?

• Anti-matter is real• It’s produced at the Large Hadron

Collider and at other particle physics facilities around the world

• An anti-matter bomb is 100% efficient and releases about 2000 times the energy per gram of 235U• Fractions of grams could generate an

explosion with multi kilotons of TNT equivalent energy release. Amazing!

• So what is this anti-matter?

Particles come in 3 families, separated by different masses

These are the most basic constituents of matter

WHAT IS MATTER?

Quarks Leptons

up

down

charm

strange

top

bottom

electron muon tau

electron neutrino

muon neutrino

tau neutrino

BUILDING A UNIVERSE

proton neutron

Multiply by billions and billions and billions and billions…

electron

Three quarks: uud make a proton Three quarks: udd make a neutron

Protons, neutrons and electrons make atoms

BUILDING A UNIVERSE

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For every particle There is an antiparticle

WHERE DOES ANTIMATTER FIT?

Particles and antiparticles have opposite electric charge

up

down

electron

electron neutrino

anti-up

anti-down

positron

Anti-electron neutrino

We can, and do

CAN WE MAKE AND STORE ANTIMATTER?

In particle accelerators

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CAN WE MAKE ANTIMATTER?

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Nature can, too

High energy protons hit the upper atmosphere and produce cascades of particles and antiparticles

Anti-Tom Hanks Tom Hanks

MATTER VS. ANTIMATTER

Would look very much

like

MATTER VS. ANTIMATTER

But were they to meet…

E=mc2

THE MOVIE’S ANTIMATTER BOMB

• Rome is threatened by ¼ gram of antimatter

• Annihilation of ¼ g matter + ¼ g antimatter = 10 kilotons of TNT• More than enough to destroy the Vatican• Book and movie get it wrong, by the way, by a

factor of two. (They forgot to include the energy from the annihilating matter!)

¼ gram

STORING AND ACCELERATING PARTICLES: LHC

• Fast racetrack: • Protons travel around the 27 km tunnel 11000

times a second

• Incredibly empty space• Pressure in beampipe ten times smaller than on

the moon

• Colder than interstellar space• Magnets are kept at 1.9º above absolute zero

• Hottest place in the galaxy• Collisions generate a Temperature one billion times

higher than the interior of the Sun

HOW DO WE MAKE ANTIPROTONS?

For every million protons, we only produce 20 antiprotons

HOW MUCH ANTI-MATTER?

• We make very little antimatter• Fermilab creates 2 nanograms of antiprotons per year

• It would take 109 million years to make ¼ gram

WHAT ANTI-MATTER IS NOT…

• A Source of Limitless Energy• To make a single anti-proton currently requires billions

of times more energy than is “stored” by separating anti-matter from matter

• More energy goes in than is produced

• Easy to Store

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PET Scans

ANTIMATTER CAN BE USED FOR

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ANTIMATTER CAN BE USED FOR

• Solving some of the biggest mysteries in science• Why do we live in a universe with an excess of matter

over antimatter?• What gives particles mass that is released as energy

when matter and antimatter meet? (E=mc2)

THE MYSTERY OF ANTIMATTER

• We exist because there is almost no antimatter nearby

• More surprisingly, we don’t see evidence of far away anti-matter!

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THE BIG BANG

• 14 billion years ago, the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter

• Everything should have annihilated

• Instead…

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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ANTIMATTER?

• After 40 years of research we know that some particles (quarks) behave differently from their antiparticles• But this difference is very slight – not enough to explain the lack of

antimatter in the Universe today

• We are searching for another explanation in the tiniest building blocks of nature, fundamental particles and forces

SOLVING THE MYSTERY

• When they travel over long distances, neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts may behave differently

• Experiments in US, Japan and Europe underway to look for this

With neutrinos?

• Neutrinos Hardly ever interact• require detecting subtle events

over huge volumes

NEUTRINO TECHNOLOGY

• A Rochester connection!• Masatoshi Koshiba, UR PhD 1955, worked with Japanese

industry to develop the enabling technology

• High efficiency, large area single photon detecting devices

NEUTRINO TECHNOLOGY (CONT’D)

University of Rochester works on neutrinos too!

Do completely new particles or forces differentiate matter from anti-matter?

SOLVING THE MYSTERY

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WHY DO WE HAVE MASS?

• Still a mystery• One possibility: Higgs field• Predicted in 1964• Still unconfirmed

• Can prove it by finding the Higgs Boson• The (awful) term “God particle” was coined

by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman

WHAT’S A HIGGS BOSON?

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Tevatron Large Hadron Collider

THE SEARCH IS ON

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WHAT’S OUT THERE?

• Astronomy tells us:• The matter we know is

5% of the universe• The rest is dark matter• And dark energy

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DARK MATTER

• “Dark” because we can’t detect it

• Can tell it’s there from effects on galaxies

• Could be made of undiscovered particles

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On earth In space

SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER

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At particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider

WE MIGHT EVEN MAKE DARK MATTER

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Summary

• Anti-matter is very real• It can release lots of energy... but it takes lots of energy to make• The technology to make and store anti-matter in bulk does not exist• The Universe is not made of anti-matter. Where did it go?

• Anti-matter is one of many remaining questions in the physics of fundamental particles and interactions

• Thousands of scientists collaborate on these problems at CERN and other international laboratories• LHC is arguably world's largest, most complex scientific instrument • First collisions this Fall!

AN INVITATION

Particle physics is just one of many exciting areas under intensive study in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester

Our colloquium series features two or three talks a year aimed at an audience more broad than physics PhDs

I’ll keep an eye out for these and pass on the word

Please attend if you are interested! All are welcome.

THANK YOU

For more information

www.uslhc.us

www.fnal.gov

www.cern.ch

www.pas.rochester.edu

BACKUP MATERIAL

Science and Religion

• Science wants to address creation of our Universe, just as religion does. Scientists follow the scientific method:

• Many scientists find justification for their faith in the results of

their work.• I believe there is no inherent conflict.

hypothesis observation synthesis

Fundamental research has always been a driving force for innovation

Relativity

Discovered the electron

J.J. Thompson

A. Einstein

100% science

100% science