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LIFE AS A SCIENTIST
When it comes to research at CERN, much spotlight has been shone on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And rightly so. decade of meticulous design and hard work, from a big team of some of the brightest minds of our time. Inconspicuously lying 100 metres underneath the picturesque Rhone-Alpes region, and straddling the FrancoSwiss border near Geneva, the some of the biggest questions LHC, scientists try to re-create the condition right after the Big Bang by accelerating two beams of protons and ions in opposite directions to almost the The target of the CNGS facility at CERN speed of light and then smashing energy and trace of the resulting product to look for tell-tale signs of how our universe was formed and how it developed. not all that CERN does. CERN also designs, runs and inspire ingenuity and spark exuberant dialogues in this So here goes. CERN NEUTRINOS TO GRAN SASSO surrounding neutrinos. Neutrinos are very light, neutral particles that interact very little with matter, thus they are extremely hard to be detected. Often neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino) but it And this happens when neutrinos travel long distance project sends neutrinos from CERN’s facilities to the detector at another location 732 km away at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory located in the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy. 1
is the experiment at the heart of the neutrinos’ episode that was unveiled in September 2011. Although later disproved, the speeding neutrinos chapter is a demonstration of how modern
sometimes a spectator sport, with extraordinary results being debated in public. A contentious point and maybe even a lesson learnt -- many might say -but this self-correcting mechanism is at the heart and ISOTOPE SEPARATOR ON L DETECTOR ISOLDE produces low-energy beams of radioactive isotopes1 including atomic physics, astrophysics, solid-state 600 isotopes of more than 60 elements (from helium to radium) have been produced.
Atomic nuclei that has too many or too few neutrons to be stable.
S C I E N T I F I C M A L AY S I A N
“The LHC is a dream beyond the paradigm. But that is not all that CERN does.”
