The construction of a vast particle accelerator has started in the German city of Darmstadt. Researchers want to find out how matter developed after the Big Bang 13.8 million years ago.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/GSI Helmholtzzentrum
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FAIR is a huge joint project: Among those present at the groundbreaking ceremony today at Darmstadt were researchers from India, Finland, France, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, the UK and Germany. The actual breaking of the ground took place years ago. Caterpillars have been moving soil in preparation of the huge underground accelerator project at the Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) for a long time.
In 2025 the FAIR Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) is supposed to start operating. FAIR will be an extension of the existing GSI (Society for Heavy Ion Research) particle accelerator in Darmstadt, southern Germany, which researchers have used for nuclear research, plasma research, materials science and medical research in the past decades.
The construction site of FAIR is located right next to the existing GSIImage: picture-alliance/dpa/GSI Helmholtzzentrum
What's new about FAIR?
The current accelerator "SIS18" has a diameter of 218 meters. It can accelerate ions to 90 percent of the speed of light. That's about 270,000 kilometers per second. FAIR will give the particles an additional push and get them to almost the speed of light.
The new accelerator ring has a diameter of 1,100 meters and is located 17 meters below the surface. It will be one of a total of eight new ring accelerators, which are all interconnected.
The complex design of the facility will enable researchers to conduct a large variety of experiments with all kinds of elements including hydrogen ions as well as radioactive isotopes such as uranium.
Furthermore, it will be possible to generate antiprotons. Those are particles of anti-matter that hold the same charge as a proton - just that it is negative, not positive.
The linear accelerator UNILAC is one of the many existing systems at GSI. It will later become a preaccelerator for FAIR. Image: picture-alliance/dpa/GSI Helmholtzzentrum
For the huge amount of data that the new particle accelerator will generate, the GSI has recently inaugurated a new data center. Currently, it only works at a fraction of its future capacity. But it is ready to support the scientists in their work - and they'll need it.
What kind of experiments?
There will be more than 3,000 scientists from all over the world at FAIR. They will design their various experimental set-ups at universities and research institutes and then implement the experiments at FAIR.
There will be four large departments: Atomic, Plasma Physics and Application (APPA), Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM), Nuclear Structure, Astrophysics and Reactions (NUSTAR) and Antiproton Annihilation (PANDA).
What's it good for?
The versatility of the facility is a great advantage for fundamental research. All kinds of theoretical conditions or those observed somewhere in outer space can be recreated under laboratory conditions in a very small space - at an atomic scale.
The HADES detector will be used to create extremely dense matter - like in a neutron star. Image: picture-alliance/dpa/GSI Helmholtzzentrum
That can include very hot or cold plasmas, extremely high pressures or other conditions that exist only in the inner parts of stars or planets.
Those experiments are designed to help scientists get a better understanding of how our universe developed after the Big Bang and how it evolved to look like we know it today.
Maybe, one day, that will help solve the mystery of anti-matter. It is something we do know exists in large parts of our universe - but we still don't know exactly what it is.
Besides those fundamental questions of our existence, there are many more applications, for example in biology and physics. At FAIR, it will be possible to investigate the effects of cosmic rays on our cells.
Also, scientists can test materials or electronic components that are supposed to be deployed in space ships - maybe in those flying to the sun or close to giant gas planets.
All this is just a tiny fraction of what scientists can do at FAIR. Certainly, the longer the facility is in operation, the more ideas will come flowing. And one thing is always certain in fundamental research: nobody ever knows what the exact outcome of an experiment will be. We may certainly expect some surprises.
Huge digital cameras record tiny particles
In the world’s largest particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ions smash into each other at the speed of light, splitting into even smaller particles. And it is all recorded with massive digital cameras.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Pictures of particles
The ALICE detector, owned by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) - is located more than 90 meters underneath this colorful building in Geneva. ALICE is a huge digital camera capable of photographing even the smallest building blocks of the universe - the components of an atom's nucleus.
Image: DW/F. Schmidt
Helmets required
In addition to ALICE, three other detector cameras, named ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb, keep a record of particle collisions at the LHC. To see them you have to go deep below the rock of the French and Swiss Alps.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Did puny particles follow the Big Bang?
When protons or lead ions smash together at the speed of light the smallest elementary particles are released - and this is what it looks like to the CMS detector. Scientists believe our universe was created from such particles in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Image: 2011 CERN
On track at high speed
This is where lead ions and hydrogen protons are accelerated. They fly through a vacuum tube with the energy of a speeding train and are kept on track by massive electromagnets. The pipe has a circumference of 27 kilometers and can be accessed through the four large detectors where the particle collisions take place.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
The world’s largest fridge
The electromagnets that keep the particle beam on track are made of superconducting inductors. The cables must be kept at a chilly minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456 Fahrenheit) so they no longer have any electrical resistance. To cool them down, the collider sends a whole lot of liquid helium through the pipes.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Precise magnets
The LHC is not a perfect circle but instead consists of long straight stretches interrupted by curves, where magnets redirect the beam. The electromagnets are extremely precise. Just before a collision they focus the beam in exactly the angle so that the probability of two particles colliding is very high. The clash then happens right in the middle of the detector.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Built like a ship in a bottle
The detectors are as big as multi-level houses. But they all had to be brought into the mountain in smaller parts through narrow shafts like this one. Underneath it is a gigantic cavern where ALICE was put together.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
8,000 photos per second
This is the ALICE detector when it is opened for maintenance. When in operation, ion beams collide in its center. New particles are created, flying off in different directions through several layers of silicon chips, similar to the sensors of a digital camera. The chips and other detectors record the particles' routes. ALICE can capture 1.25 gigabytes of digital data each second.
Image: DW/F. Schmidt
Electromagnets make particles identifiable
This blue chunk is another huge electromagnet, an important part of the ALICE detector. It creates a field making it possible to identify particles that are created during the high-speed collisions. Scientists study the direction the new particles travel. For instance, they can determine whether particles were neutral or positively or negatively charged.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Wings to catch a muon
The ATLAS detector has a special gauge, the so-called muon spectrometer, which lies outside the detector’s heart, just like large wings. With these wings a heavy relative of the electrons - the muon - can be caught. Muons are difficult to find because they only exist for two millionths of a second.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Watching from a safe distance
All detectors have a control room, just like this one for ATLAS. Once the collider is in operation, no one is allowed to stay inside the underground facilities. An out of control proton beam can melt 500 kilograms of copper and escaped helium could cause frostbite and suffocation. The particle stream could even create radioactivity.
Image: DW/F. Schmidt
What to do with the data?
The detectors deliver data 40 million times per second. But because not all collisions are interesting for scientists, the data has to be filtered. In the end, no more than 100 interesting particle collisions per second remain. That’s still more than 700 megabytes of data per second - about what fits on a commercial CD. All data initially lands here in CERN’s data processing center.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
A global computer network
CERN produces an amount of data per year that if it were stored on CD, the pile would be 20 kilometers high. Even though such a tape library can hold a lot of data, it is still not enough. So the data are distributed worldwide. More than 200 universities and research institutes have created a worldwide CERN computer network with their data processing centers.
Image: DW/F.Schmidt
Data for everyone
Particle physicists from around the world have access to CERN data. The center sees itself as a service provider for universities and institutes conducting basic research. A common project for everyone's benefit.
