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The Quantum Frontier

The Large Hadron Collider

Don Lincoln
foreword by Leon Lederman

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The highest-energy particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider runs under the border between France and Switzerland. It leapt into action on September 10, 2008, amid unprecedented global press coverage and widespread fears that its energy would create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth.

By smashing together particles smaller than atoms, the LHC recreates the conditions hypothesized to have existed just moments after the big bang. Physicists expect it to aid our understanding of how the universe came into being and to show us much about the standard model of particle...

The highest-energy particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider runs under the border between France and Switzerland. It leapt into action on September 10, 2008, amid unprecedented global press coverage and widespread fears that its energy would create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth.

By smashing together particles smaller than atoms, the LHC recreates the conditions hypothesized to have existed just moments after the big bang. Physicists expect it to aid our understanding of how the universe came into being and to show us much about the standard model of particle physics—even possibly proving the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson. In exploring what the collider does and what it might find, Don Lincoln explains what the LHC is likely to teach us about particle physics, including uncovering the nature of dark matter, finding micro black holes and supersymmetric particles, identifying extra dimensions, and revealing the origin of mass in the universe.

Thousands of physicists from around the globe will have access to the LHC, none of whom really knows what outcomes will be produced by the $7.7 billion project. Whatever it reveals, the results arising from the Large Hadron Collider will profoundly alter our understanding of the cosmos and the atom and stimulate amateur and professional scientists for years to come.

Reviews

Reviews

What Lincoln does brilliantly is dispel the popular myth that the LHC was built solely to discover the Higgs boson, or 'God particle'. This is a project with a far wider reach... His fresh analogies and insights make this book very readable.

The book is written in a very readable and entertaining style, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in science.

A Fermilab scientist conveys the excitement surrounding the LHC.

This small book conveys the excitement and the importance of science's biggest ever experiment.

I deeply enjoyed Lincoln’s very accessible discussions of antimatter and Cerenkov radiation. And the in-depth explanations of what the different calorimeters and solenoids do inside the LHC’s vast underground accelerator are fascinating.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
192
ISBN
9780801891441
Illustration Description
43 halftones, 39 line drawings
Subject
Table of Contents

Foreword, by Leon Lederman
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. What We Know: The Standard Model
2. What We Guess: Theories We Want to Test
3. How We Do It: The Large Hadron Collider
4. How We See It: The Enormous

Foreword, by Leon Lederman
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. What We Know: The Standard Model
2. What We Guess: Theories We Want to Test
3. How We Do It: The Large Hadron Collider
4. How We See It: The Enormous Detectors
5. Where We're Going: The Big Picture, the Universe, and the Future
Epilogue
Suggested Reading
Index

Author Bio
Don Lincoln
Featured Contributor

Don Lincoln, Ph.D.

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at Fermilab. He is the author of The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider and The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind.