Large Hadron Collider to receive new large-scale MATHUSLA detector to detect hypothetical particles with a long period of existence.
The collider was built to confirm the existence of Higgs boson, predicted by the standard model of elementary particle physics. The accelerator successfully coped with this task. However, the second goal of its work, the search for new elementary particles and anything that could go beyond the standard model, turned out to be much more difficult and has not yet been marked by significant success.
For more than 10 years of operation, the collider has not been able to detect traces of phenomena and elementary particles that would go beyond the standard model. According to scientists from the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), this is not a bad thing, as these results helped to refute a large number of alternative theories.
However, the collider, which is successful in detecting subatomic particles, has one major drawback. It was designed to search for specific hadrons, most of which have an electric charge and a very short lifetime. Physicists suggest that there is a separate kind of particle that may have no charge and exist much longer, allowing them to escape detection by the accelerator’s detectors.
After the collider began operating, a team of scientists and engineers gathered to address this shortcoming. They set about designing an additional detector to search for such long-lived particles. The new detector was named MATHUSLA in honor of the biblical character Methuselah, who, according to biblical texts, lived for about 900 years. The name of the detector stands for MAssive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra-Stable neutraL pArticles.
MATHUSLA is currently in the final stages of development, and its construction, if current funding levels are maintained, could begin as early as 2025. The detector will be a 40-meter diameter chamber filled with oxygen only and surrounded by a large number of smaller detectors. It will be located about 100 meters from the collider’s main energy beam, with the space between them filled with dirt and rocks.
A number of hypothetical particles could have lifetimes of several hundred nanoseconds, which is much longer than most particles captured by the collider If MATHULSA is triggered, an additional detector will wait until one of these long-lived particles enters the main chamber. There, it will decay into a stream of other particles, and groups of detectors will search for their characteristic radiation.
Such particles could help physicists to better understand the nature of the Higgs boson, possible related elementary particles, and explain the weak gravitational interaction MATHULSA can even help scientists uncover the essence of mysterious matter.
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Source: LiveScience