#moedal

On the topic of a new electron-positron collider in response to people saying they should spend money on something 'more important'! (I am open to differing opinions from my own - this is my own view and the evidence I formed it from!) This comes after a press release today from CERN on https://home.cern/news/news/physics/particle-physicists-update-strategy-future-field-europe 

This has caused quite a bit of controversy within the scientific community - that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, a climate crisis, why should we care about particle physics and a new expensive project that could just prove the standard model is more or less complete, and maybe ‘just fill in the odd gap’?

Firstly: in response to people saying the money should be sent on climate change or pandemic management, the tech that is developed to make such a particle collider, such as the LHC, causes huge tech advancements which can even be used in medical fields eg https://t.co/kwun6K7H6t?amp=1

Secondly: a high-profile project such as this, and the results it could bring, will be great for future research funding for all science, not to mention the job opportunities for scientists and engineers (eg, ATLAS has ~3000 authors from 181 institutions! https://atlas.cern/discover/collaboration)

Thirdly: although 'the Large Hadron collider' is one collider, it isn't just one experiment! There are 7 experiments at the LHC: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb, TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL! There have been over 2725 papers published from the LHC experiment: see this article on what 10 years of the LHC have achieved: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/10-years-of-lhc-physics-in-numbers

Finally, all I have to finish with is a quote from Stephen Hawking: “It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.”

CERN: The LHC MoEDAL Experiment

A new experiment is set to join the LHC fold. As James Pinfold explains, MoEDAL will conduct the search for magnetic monopoles.

On 2 December 2009 the CERN Research Board approved the LHC's seventh experiment: the Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC (MoEDAL). The prime motivation of this experiment is to search for the direct production of the magnetic monopole at the LHC. Another physics aim is the search for exotic, highly ionizing, stable (or pseudo-stable) massive particles (SMPs) with conventional electric charge. Although MoEDAL is a small experiment by LHC standards it has a huge physics potential that complements the already wide vista of the existing LHC experiments.

Students will help the MoEDAL experiment at CERN seek evidence of magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes and other phenomena.

For the first time, a high school has joined a high-energy physics experiment as a full member. Students from the Simon Langton Grammar School in Canterbury, England, have become participants in the newest experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The students will help with the search for new exotic particles such as magnetic monopoles, massive supersymmetric particles, microscopic black hole remnants, Q-balls and strangelets through an experiment called MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC).

The students, who take part in a school-based research lab, will remotely monitor radiation backgrounds at the experiment.