Date: Wednesday 11 Dec 2013
Time: 19:00 – refreshments from 18:30
Speaker: Professor David Evans – The University of Birmingham www.ep.ph.bham.ac.uk/
Location: Large lecture theatre, Engineering and Computing Building – Coventry University
Abstract:
The 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), situated 150 metres under the Swiss-French boarder at CERN near Geneva, is the World’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Protons (hydrogen nuclei) are smashed together at 0.999999991 times the speed of light recreating, for a tiny instant, the violent particle collisions which would have existed less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. At the end of each year, lead nuclei are accelerated and collided in the LHC producing the highest temperatures and densities ever made in an experiment and recreating the exotic primordial soup which existed at the birth of our Universe. This is literally like a soup, it had been found to model an ideal liquid.
Professor David Evans, from the University of Birmingham, explained the physics behind the LHC, what we further expect to learn and summarised the latest results.
His talk included audience participation and demonstrations with liquid nitrogen and was aimed at all age groups.
Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Top and Bottom. The only job in the world where you get paid to look for a big Bottom (Quark – of course).