Day 4: Where particles are smashed together, CERN, Geneva

Tinkering with magnetic quadrupole

I visited CERN today, and unfortunately, the tour was closed due to their being in the midst of their 60th birthday celebrations. However, their Microcosm exhibition was amazing. It included a number of recordings of physicists talking about what they thought were the biggest, most fascinating unsolved mysteries of the universe. It also showed the evolution of particle accelerators, from the tiny early one, only a few centimetres in diameter, to the 27 km LHC. I have understood (more or less) how the accelerator works - though I get a kind of vertigo when I think of the magnitude of the undertaking, but today's physics question relates to how the exotic particles that are being studied are produced.

The physics question for today is: When two particles collide at high velocity, why does their energy convert to new matter (and not electromagnetic photons - like in an x-ray tube)? Does our current model allow us to predict what matter will be produced in a particular collision? If so, HOW?

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