LHC Scientists Simulate the Sound of the 'God Particle'
Particle Collision Data from the LHC From all that visual noise, music. If a theoretical force-carrying, subatomic particle were to materialize in the universe and no one were around to hear it, would it make a sound? Existential aspects aside, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider believe that the elusive Higgs boson, should it prove to be real, will most definitely make a sound, and they plan to be around to hear it. In fact, that's one of the ways they plan to detect the so-called "god particle," and they've simulated the sounds a Higgs boson might make so they can listen for its arrival. The sound won't actually come from the particles themselves, but from the ATLAS experiment, one of the four huge sensors placed within the 17-mile particle collider. One of ATLAS's sensors, the calorimeter, measures energy from proton collisions is made of seven concentric layers. Each...