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Dr Clara Nelist is one of the scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider
We may be close to solving one of the biggest mysteries in the universe, the mystery of dark matter, with the Large Hadron Collider coming back to life on July 5th.
This mystifying substance makes up more than three-quarters of the universe, but scientists have no idea what it is.
The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located in Switzerland, has been modernized at the headquarters of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in order to help scientists understand the matter.
And if CERN scientists succeed in unlocking the secrets of dark matter, it won’t be the first time that the Large Hadron Collider has made an important discovery.
This month marks ten years since scientists made one of the biggest discoveries of the twenty-first century, which is the “Higgs boson”, or the Higgs particle.
Without that molecule, and the Higgs field that produces it, nothing in the universe as we know it could exist.
On July 5th, the Large Hadron Collider will start operating at full power as it prepares to search for dark matter.
Long trip
British molecular physicist Dr Clara Nelist is an important member of the team that hopes to discover the secrets of dark matter – but the journey she took to become a top scientist in the field has not been easy.
“We didn’t have a physics teacher at my school,” says Nelliste. This led to her having to go elsewhere to fulfill her dream of becoming a physicist.
Clara Nelist adds: “I had to travel twice a week to attend classes [الفيزياء] in another school.”
She also had to take a physics test at her school on her own before entering college.
photo released, Getty Images
The Large Hadron Collider is a 27 km diameter ring of electromagnets that accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light.
Fortunately, despite these obstacles, Clara was able to enter the University of Manchester. While she was preparing for her Ph.D., she began participating in the tests that scientists were running at the Large Hadron Collider.
Clara was at CERN headquarters in 2012 when the famous announcement of the discovery of the Higgs particle was made.
“I slept in front of the hall so that I could have a seat in that room and witness the historic moment our General Manager spoke about, when he said we had discovered this new molecule.
“The memory of the discovery motivates me to work with these teams to try and make the next big discovery.”
The discovery made headlines around the world at the time.
The Higgs molecule is very important because it relates to how other elementary particles gain mass.
“When molecules interact with the Higgs field, they gain mass, and the Higgs particle is what we were able to discover in our experiments to prove the existence of the Higgs field.”
The Higgs field is an energy field that gives mass to other major particles such as electrons and elementary particles known as quarks.
The Higgs particle was called the “divine” particle, because the process of gaining mass is similar to the Big Bang that led to the creation of the universe.
photo released, Cern
Scientists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will help solve the mystery of dark matter
Better and stronger
“The past few years have been very exciting, because we’ve been upgrading and repairing the particle accelerator and improving the experiments we’re doing with the Large Hadron Collider,” Clara says.
An update that made the device more powerful, so that more particles could collide, and more collisions meant more data that could be analyzed.
The Large Hadron Collider uses a huge amount of energy, as CERN consumes as much electricity annually as a small town, or about 300,000 homes.
Part of this energy is used to accelerate the protons to nearly the speed of light, which is fast enough to split into infinitesimal particles when they collide with each other.
“Two of the upgrades we made to the hadron collider involved increasing its energy, so subsequent collisions will be standard,” Clara says.
“We also improved the angle of intersection at which the protons collide inside the probes, and this increases the probability of two of those protons interacting, which in turn increases the amount of data we can collect.”
photo released, Getty Images
Dark matter may help us better understand the universe
The mystery of dark matter
Scientists at CERN hope that all this data will help them unlock the secrets of dark matter.
“Dark matter makes up 80 to 85 percent of the universe we live in, and the reason it’s called is because it doesn’t interact with light, so we can’t see it,” Clara says.
“The really interesting thing is that we don’t know what it is.”
So far, scientists have only indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter. Direct and unequivocal observation of dark matter particles remains elusive.
There are several theories and assumptions about the supposed form and composition of this substance. Among the theories that scientists around the world tend to favor is the theory of “weakly interacting large molecules”.
“It’s a big mystery, so we’re trying to see if we can recreate it in our experiments.”
For scientists, dark matter is one of the most frustrating mysteries about the universe — the fact that we still don’t know what its main component is.
“My personal goal is that I’d like to be able to figure out what dark matter is in my career, and we’ll see what the universe has in store for us,” Clara says.