A major part of the Large Hadron Collider’s appeal, which has brought it recognition far beyond the particle physics community, is the sheer “bigness” – of both the experiments and the questions they are designed to address.
This is undoubtedly true of the ALICE experiment, which is seeking to recreate the conditions that existed just a few picoseconds after the Big Bang. In doing so, the ALICE collaboration has recorded the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment on Earth.
In this interview with physicsworld.com, David Evans, the leader of the UK team working at ALICE, describes the huge engineering effort that went into constructing the detector. He goes on to explain how ALICE is designed to shed light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as the nature of the strong interaction that binds quarks into protons and neutrons. Press “play” for the full story.
- You can also learn about CERN’s hunt for the elusive Higgs boson in this special video report from the CMS and ATLAS experiments, also based at the LHC.
