The "ingenious" CERN experiment that will search for the mysterious "ghost particles" - 2024-03-27 07:36:07

Now scientists believe they have found a way to prove whether they exist or not.

The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) has approved an experiment designed to find evidence of its existence.

The new instrument will be a thousand times more sensitive to this type of particles than previous devices.

It will smash particles against a hard surface to detect them instead of colliding with others as CERN’s main device, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently does.

What are ghost particles?

So what are these ghostly particles and why was a new approach needed to detect them?

The current theory of particle physics is called the Standard Model.

It says that everything in the universe is made up of a family of 17 particles –some well-known, such as the electron and the Higgs boson, and others less known, but wonderfully named, such as the charmed quark, the tauon neutrino and the gluon.

Some mix in different combinations to form the larger, but still incredibly small, particles that make up the world around us, as well as the stars and galaxies we see in space, while others are involved in the forces of nature.

But there is a problem: Astronomers have noticed things in the skies (the way galaxies move, for example) that strongly suggest that everything we can observe makes up only 5% of the universe.

Part, or even all of the rest of the universe, could be made up of “ghost” or “hidden” particles..

They are believed to be double ghosts of the 17 particles of the Standard Model.

If they exist, they are really difficult to detect because they rarely interact with the world we know. Like ghosts, they pass through everything and cannot be detected by any terrestrial device.

But the theory states that ghost particles can, very rarely, decay into Standard Model particles, and thus can be measured by detectors.

The new instrument increases the possibilities of detecting these disintegrations by considerably increasing the number of collisions.

Instead of crashing particles into each other, as most current experiments do, Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) will smash them into a large block of material.

This means that all the particles will break into smaller pieces, instead of just one part. The diagram below shows why this “fixed goal” approach is much more effective.

The project’s chief ghostbuster, Professor Andrey Golutvin of Imperial College London, said: The experiment “marks a new era in the search for hidden particles.”

“SHiP has the unique possibility of solving several of the major problems in particle physics, and we have the possibility of discovering particles that have never been seen before,” he said.

The search for ghost particles requires specially adapted equipment.

In normal experiments, for example with the Large Hadron Collider, new particles can be detected up to one meter from the collision.

But ghost particles can remain invisible and travel several tens or even hundreds of meters before disintegrating and revealing themselves.

So the SHiP detectors are placed much further away.

“We are explorers”

Professor Mitesh Patel of Imperial College described the new approach as “ingenious”.

“What really attracts me about the experiment is that these particles are right under our noses, but we have never been able to see them because of the way they interact, or rather the way they do not interact.

“We are explorers and we believe we can see something interesting in this new terrain. So we have to take a look,” he explained.

The SHiP will be built within existing facilities at CERN, according to Claudia Ahdida, a physicist at the center based in Switzerland.

“We will make use of a cavern, infrastructure and existing parts that we will try to reuse as much as possible and what we will have is a facility that will help us search for this hidden sector, which has not been seen before,” he indicated.

SHiP will run alongside all of CERN’s other experiments, the largest of which is the Large Hadron Collider, which has been searching for the missing 95% of the universe since it was completed in 2008 at a cost of $4.75 billion.

So far it has found no non-Standard Model particles, so the plan is to build a machine that is three times larger and much more powerful.

Graphic showing where the new collider will be

The future circular collider has an estimated initial cost of US$7 billion. Its expected start date is in the mid-2040s, although it will not reach its full particle-search potential until 2070.

By contrast, the SHiP experiment is scheduled to begin searching for new particles in 2030 and will be 100 times cheaper, around $120 million.

But researchers say all approaches are needed to explore all possible options to find the particles they say would lead to one of the greatest advances in physics of all time.