“Gravity seems to be a missing piece [that] we can’t quite get to work with everything,” said Huth.
Huth added that physicists also do not know where mass comes from, but the most likely hypothesis is that it is bestowed by a particle called the Higgs Boson—which has never been observed.
When the particles in the LHC collide at high energies, “We’ll see huge numbers of particles coming out and every so often there will be a very rare collision that will produce some exotic form of matter,” said Huth.
It is through the analysis of this data that researchers hope to fill in the missing theoretical pieces. “This energy scale is so interesting because something has to happen,” added Huth. “At this energy scale, the theory basically breaks down unless something new happens and we don’t have a really good idea of what it is.”
The collisions may also produce or help explain the entity known as “dark matter,” which is believed to compose 96 percent of the universe, and “antimatter,” which has the same mass as matter but the opposite electric charge, explained Huth. “The Higgs Boson is the simplest model for explaining what happens in the theory and that’s what we’re designing for,” said Huth. “We aren’t under any illusions that that’s going to be the answer—a lot of us suspect nature will be more complicated than that.”
WAITING ON SURPRISES
Unfortunately for Huth, the mysteries of nature have had to be put on hold while the LHC is repaired.
When scientists were running currents through the device’s magnets in 2008, soon after its completion, a breakdown known as a “quench” occurred that caused overheating, said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, an assistant professor of physics and a member of the Harvard ATLAS team.
This failure allowed helium gas to leak into the vacuum and explode, moving the magnets and destroying a large area of the experiment, added da Costa.
The magnets are now in the midst of the long cooling process back towards absolute zero temperatures, and the LHC is slated to be turned on again late this year or in early 2010.
In the meantime, scientists are bracing themselves for the unknown.
“Nature is infinitely resourceful,” wrote James D. Wells, a member of the CERN theory group, in a recent e-mail from England, “and will keep us very busy no matter what surprises the LHC reveals.”
—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Huma N. Shah can be reached at hshah@fas.harvard.edu.