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Listen to The Sounds of the God Particle

by Matthew Zuras on June 24, 2010 at 09:00 AM

god particle simulationYou've totally heard about this thing called the Large Hadron Collider because 1) it is easily confused by children and poor typists to be a euphemism for an erection, 2) it cost $8 billion to build and yet was easily shut down when a bird dropped a baguette on it, 3) it makes some people fear that it'll open up a black hole or bizarro universe where Justin Bieber is NOT trending on Twitter, and 4) least importantly, it's looking for a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson that no one's sure even exists.

Now that you're up to speed on your LHCs, one method that scientists are using to look for the Higgs boson -- otherwise known as "the God particle" because, if real, it would be responsible for the existence of mass in the universe -- is to synthesize the sound that they think it might make. By converting data collected within the LHC into sonic frequencies, researchers believe that particle hunter's ears will be best suited to pick out the presence of the undiscovered boson. Who needs to look for a particle when you can listen for one?

The Collider is a nearly 17-mile ring full of magnets, through which physicists have been shooting beams of protons since becoming fully operational in March. As those proton beams cross, the particles collide and transform into new particles for study. At one of the four "experiment" points situated within the LHC ring -- in particular, the ATLAS experiment -- researchers have assigned musical notes to a seven-layer calorimeter, which detects changes in energy levels. The pitch of the particle's song bends depending on the energy amount deposited in each ring.

Some of the team involved with the project told BBC News that they felt "something akin to a religious experience while listening to the sounds." This is interesting because the sounds are based on simulations of experiments -- the particles themselves do not (as far as we can tell) emit audible sounds. But Arthur Endrich, a software engineer working on the project, told the BBC, "[The sound is] true to the data, and it's telling you something about the data that you couldn't know in any other way."

You can check out the synthesized, subatomic tunes here. We think it sounds a bit like some throwaway tracks by Coil, but to each their own. Still, these are mighty interesting developments to come out of CERN. Good job, Science! [From: BBC]

Tags: cern, God particle, GodParticle, higgs boson, HiggsBoson, large hadron collider, LargeHadronCollider, lhc, science, simulated, synthesized, top

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