Kent Fukuzura, Making Science Simple
What is it with atoms anyway? They’re tiny, you can’t see them, and yet they hold everything together. In fact they are everything! What’s even more astonishing is that atoms are made of even smaller things, things that don’t follow the normal rules of behaviour. This week we’re going to build an atom smasher so we can have a look at some of these really small particles.
What you’ll need:
In order to smash atoms you’ll have to get them moving at each other fast enough to cause some serious damage. In your backyard dig out two circular tunnels that cross over each other at one point. The bigger the better, but don’t worry if you can’t get more than a mile out of each circle. For those in apartments, you’ll have to make do with your living room. Just remember to clean up before dinner.
In each ring put accelerator rings made up of superconducting electromagnets. Be careful with these things because once they get stuck to the fridge you’ll have a hard time prying them off. If you’re building this in your living room try attaching them to an old electric stock-car racing kit. In the back yard put down some tarp to keep dirt and moisture from getting into the magnets. Remember that electricity and water are a dangerous combination!
You can smash all sorts of atoms, but the professionals use gold, so see if you can scrape a few shavings off of mother’s wedding ring.
Let’s smash atoms!
Design your magnets to guide the atoms as fast as they can in the two tunnels before they collide where the tunnels meet. You should get them about the speed of light.
For a fraction of a second, the colliding atoms will reach temperatures one hundred thousand times hotter than the core of the Sun–hot enough to tear them apart into a soup of quarks, gluons, protons and neutrons before they race out into the big wide world.
What can we learn from smashing atoms?
Studying the properties of atoms and their parts: the quark-gluon plasma, protons, hadrons will help explain their origins. What are their temperatures, particle densities, and entropic properties? With enough data we should be able to create exciting new atoms with properties we’ve never seen before, atoms that will benefit our scientific endeavours and make new materials for exciting new experiments.
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