On June 16, 2016, CERN, the European Organization for
Nuclear Research in Geneva, started a project to
accelerate charged particles.
Ten days later, photographer Christophe Suarez posted a series of photographs
of the skies above CERN.
Those jaw-dropping photos showed the formation of strange clouds and were proof
that the biggest experiment in the world is about to
tear up a portal to another universe.
Up till now, we have only seen such incidents in the
movies, but now after witnessing it in reality, people are
not only concerned but scared if the scientists really have
found a way to open a portal to another world.
What will happen next?
Are we going to be destroyed or meet ourselves in another dimension?
But what really is of everyone’s concern is the comeback of CERN.
Nobody knows the secrets it holds, and today we will
try to unravel the hidden truth about the gateway
to the parallel universe.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known
by its French acronym CERN, is something that you hear
about when there is some news about a newly discovered
subatomic particle.
It is the world’s largest particle physics lab, and it has the biggest accelerator
in the world, the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider.
The credit for being the biggest goes to its circular tunnel of
nearly 17 miles, or 27 kilometers in circumference.
The LHC, like all physics experiments, tries to test theoretical
predictions and find whether any are flawed.
It enables atoms to be smashed together with even greater power at
nearly the speed of light, allowing it to recreate conditions
comparable to those experienced during the universe's
beginning.
In 2012, a watershed moment for the LHC was the
discovery of the Higgs Boson, also known as "the god
particle."
The physicists believe it will reveal the secrets
of how the universe was created, as well as validate the
Big Bang theory, which describes how an invisible, universe-wide field imparted mass to all things
immediately after the bang.
The discovery of the particle lends significant support to the Standard
Model of particle physics, or the established rules of particle
physics that scientists believe control the fundamental
building blocks of matter.
Now that they’ve identified the Higgs boson, scientists at
the LHC have set their eyes on an even more elusive
target.
All around us is dark matter and dark energy.
It's the invisible stuff that binds the galaxy
together and makes up more than 95 percent of the universe.
But no one has been able to directly detect it.
Scientists only know it exists from the effects it causes.
Astrophysicist Zhen Liu at the University of Minnesota
told The Daily Galaxy in an email that the "Higgs boson,
a critical component of the Standard Model...
could also play the role of the portal between the luminous
world and the dark world."
Theorists believe there is one type of dark particle that only interacts with normal
matter on rare occasions.
Researchers believe that this particle can get caught up in the proton collisions that
the LHC is continually making and monitoring.
Liu is of the view that we might be able to directly detect
the decay or transitions between distinct states of particles
that exist in the dark realm if we use quantum mechanical
coupling.
Even better, we could be able to directly make
dark-world particles and identify them using our great
control of Higgs boson production at the Large Hadron
Collider and future colliders.
Recently, a group of scientists announced that they
believe they can explain dark matter using a particle that,
according to them, can travel to the fifth dimension.
Scientists, in research published in the European Physical
Journal C, claim that the particle can shed light on dark
matter.
According to the latest research, 5D equations have been created that indicate the ramifications
of an extra dimension in our universe and reality
as we know it.
The researchers looked at fermion masses, which they
believe can be transferred into the fifth dimension via
portals, resulting in dark matter relics and "fermionic dark
matter" in the novel fifth dimension.
According to the researchers, "If this heavy particle exists,
it would necessarily connect the visible matter that
we know and that we have studied in detail with the constituents
of dark matter, assuming the dark matter is composed
of fundamental fermions, which live in the extra
dimension."
Liu also exclaimed, "I cannot imagine how breathtaking
the world would be when we master and control luminous
matter and dark matter."
But, for the particle to be discovered, a lot more energy is
required than the LHC that discovered the Higgs.
To get to the mark, scientists have spent 21 billion
pounds.
The LHC was shut down in December 2018 to allow
for upgrade work to take place.
The Large Hadron Collider was stopped for two years in order to make
"major improvements" to the system.
After the improvements, the Large Hadron Collider reopened in April this year and is ramping
up for a third run to study new worlds of physics.
This is going to be the most powerful version of it yet.
A support manager of the project said, "Run 3 is exciting for me
not only because it will give us more data at higher
collision energies, which we always love, but also because
the detector is the best it’s ever been."
Now, the trap is all set for the particle to be caught at
anytime.
LianTao Wang, professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological
Physics at the University of Chicago, said, "If the
particle is there, we just have to find a way to dig it out."
Usually, the key is finding the right question to ask.
" This was about the happy part, and now the
conspiracies begin.
As the LHC began to run again on April 22, wild
rumors began to circulate that CERN was opening a
portal to hell in quest of the god particle.
This is not the first time scientists have come across such
a thing.
Remember the incident of 2016?
Those photographs revealed an unusual cloud formation and electrical
activity above the CERN facility.
The strange clouds sparked a media frenzy regarding "portals"
in the sky, given that the LHC has found small black holes
when smashing particles, which could suggest parallel
universes in extra dimensions.
What we previously saw could turn into a storm now that the CERN is even more
powerful than before.
Stephan Hawking, a renowned scientist, also warned us
about the God particle.
He even bet Gordon Kane $100 that physicists could not discover the Higgs
Boson, but when they did, Hawking issued a stern warning.
In his famous book "Starmus", the scientist claimed
that the particle could one day be responsible for
the destruction of the known universe.
He wrote, "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become
mega stable at energies above 100 billion giga-electron-volts."
Here, the biggest concern about the destruction is the
formation of small black holes that would expand and
eventually decompose the world from within.
Despite CERN scientists' assurances that these black
holes would not destroy the universe, British astronomer
Sir Martin Rees agrees with Hawking that they could open
a Pandora's box, unleashing high-energy "strange
matter" that is extremely unstable and causing a "catastrophic
vacuum decay" that would cause time and space to
collapse.
Hawking warned that "this could happen at any
time and we wouldn't see it coming."
Although such a catastrophe is unlikely in the near future,
Hawking believes the risk of the Higgs becoming destabilized
at high energy is too large to ignore.
Scientists believe such particles could play a game-
changing role in the cosmic history of the universe,
producing gravitational waves of such amplitude that
future gravitational wave detectors could hunt for them.
For now, we do not know when the particle will be
discovered, but everyone is in search of it.
To get the answers, LHC will run for two years.
When Run 3 comes to an end in 2024, CERN scientists
will shut it down for another scheduled renovation,
which will include more upgrades for the giant particle
accelerator.
When the renovations are finished, scientists will be able
to rename the LHC the "High Luminosity Large Hadron
Collider" when it reopens in 2028.
The next generation of Higgs factories, for example, will
be entirely focused on examining the fascinating possibilities centered around the Higgs gateway.
The International Linear Collider (ILC) under
consideration in Japan and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC)
at CERN are two linear Higgs factories, whereas the
Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN and the Circular
Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) in China are two
circular Higgs factories.
The particle smasher in China will be five times more powerful than the
LHC at CERN.
As Europe and China rush to find the god particle, it may
not be long until the world learns who is at the end of the
quest—the universe's creator or destroyer.
What do you think about this portal to another dimension?
Who are we going to meet at the other end?
Let us know in the comments section below.