THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at GlasgowUniversity and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
In particle physics and quantum chemistry, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles. For example an antielectron (a positron, an electron with a positive charge) and an antiproton (a proton with a negative charge) could form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing of matter and antimatter would lead to the annihilation of both in the same way that mixing of antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs. The particles resulting from matter-antimatter annihilation are endowed with energy equal to the difference between the rest mass of the products of the annihilation and the rest mass of the original matter-antimatter pair, which is often quite large.
There is considerable speculation both in science and science fiction as to why the observable universe is apparently almost entirely matter, whether other places are almost entirely antimatter instead, and what might be possible if antimatter could be harnessed, but at this time the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. The process developing particles and antiparticles is called baryogenesis.
Briefing room
If you could convert all of the energy contained in 1 kg of sugar, or 1 kg of water, or 1 kg of any other stuff, you could drive a car for about 100,000 years without stopping!
Why? Albert Einstein, in 1905, wrote down the famous equation E=mc2. It says that mass is a very concentrated form of energy.
Energy is like the 'money' of nature; it comes in two different currencies, and with an enormous exchange rate - the square of the speed of light .
1 kg corresponds to 25,000,000,000 kWh of energy; 1 gr would be enough to supply energy to a medium-sized town for a whole day!
But how can energy be transformed into matter, or vice versa? Big meteorites traverse our solar system with a typical speed of about 30 km/sec. If such a meteorite enters the Earth's atmosphere, its energy of movement is converted into heat, reaching 100,000 Co or more and melting most of its material ('shooting star').
We do not have the technology to make a space ship go at the speed of light (300,000 km/sec), but it is possible - using accelerators at CERN - to make single particles (like a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) go that fast.
If a particle moving with this speed hits a block of material, its energy is also transformed, producing 'temperatures' of 10,000,000,000,000 Co or more. Under these extreme circumstances, the energy set free in the collision will transform into matter.
But: what kind of matter do I produce in such collisions?
In a coin factory, hot metal is pressed into coins. They only come in specific sizes and values, as 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 50p and 1 pound.
Similarly, nature does not allow energy to be converted into just any kind of matter. Nature has provided us with 'moulds', corresponding to a precisely defined amount of energy, as well as having some other particular properties.
These moulds are analogous to particles, the most important ones in our daily lives being the proton, the neutron and the electron. They have very precisely defined properties, such as their mass, their electric charge or the way they interact with other particles.
So can I transform energy into a single proton or a single electron?
Imagine a hot metal sheet in a coin factory ('energy'). When you stamp out a coin from a metal sheet, you are left with a coin and a hole in the sheet.You could call this hole an "anticoin".
This is similar to what happens when energy transforms into matter. Many experiments have shown that you can only produce a pair of particle and its mirror image, called 'antiparticle', at the same time. Nobody has ever observed the production of only particles, or only antiparticles.
That example also shows another feature observed with particles and antiparticles. To create them, it takes energy, and when you bring them back together ('annihilation', because they disappear into a flash of energy), this energy is released. It is like putting the coin back into the hole, leaving the original metal sheet.
The Antimatter Factory (by Django Manglunki)
Over the past 20 years scientists at CERN have been using antiparticles in many different ways for their daily work.
Antiparticles can be generated by colliding subatomic particles. Before being delivered to the various physics experiments, they must be isolated, collected and stored in order to tune their energy to the appropriate level.
Until now, each of these steps has been carried out by a dedicated machine with the main purpose of providing high energy antiparticles.
But now the first "self-contained antiproton factory", the Antiproton Decelerator (or AD), is operational at CERN . It will produce the low energy antiprotons needed for a range of studies, including the synthesis of antihydrogen atoms - the creation of antimatter.
What is the AD?
The Antiproton Decelerator is a very special machine compared to what already exists at CERN and other laboratories around the world. So far, an "antiparticle factory" consisted of a chain of several accelerators, each one performing one of the steps needed to produce antiparticles. The CERN antiproton complex is a very good example of this.
At the end of the 70's CERN built an antiproton source called the Antiproton Accumulator (AA). Its task was to produce and accumulate high energy antiprotons to feed into the SPS in order to transform it into a "proton-antiproton collider".
As soon as antiprotons became available, physicists realized how much could be learned by using them at low energy, so CERN decided to build a new machine: LEAR, the Low Energy Antiproton Ring. Antiprotons accumulated in the AA were extracted, decelerated in the PS and then injected into LEAR for further deceleration. In 1986 a second ring, the Antiproton Collector (AC), was built around the existing AA in order to improve the antiproton production rate by a factor of 10.
The AC is now being transformed into the AD, which will perform all the tasks that the AC, AA, PS and LEAR used to do with antiprotons, i.e. produce, collect, cool, decelerate and eventually extract them to the experiments.
Schematic of CERN's antiproton complex until 1996 (click for the full view)
What does the AD consist of?
The AD ring is an approximate circle with a circumference of 188 m. It consists of a vacuum pipe surrounded by a long sequence of vacuum pumps, magnets, radio-frequency cavities, high voltage instruments and electronic circuits. Each of these pieces has its specific function:
- Antiprotons circulate inside the vacuum pipe in order to avoid contact with normal matter (like air molecules), and annihilate. The vacuum must be optimal, therefore several vacuum pumps, which extract air, are placed around the pipe.
- Magnets as well are placed all around. There are two types of magnets: the dipoles (which have a North and a South pole, like the well-known horseshoe magnet) serve to change the direction of movement and make sure the particles stay within their circular track. They are also called "bending magnets". Quadrupoles (which have four poles) are used as 'lenses'. These "focussing magnets" make sure that the size of the beam is smaller than the size of the vacuum pipe.
- Magnetic fields can change the direction and size of the beam, but not its energy. To do this you need an electric field: this is provided by radio-frequency cavities that produce high voltages in synchronicity with the rotation of particles around the ring.
- Several other instruments are needed to perform more specific tasks: two cooling systems "squeeze" the beam in size and energy; one injection and one ejection system let the beam in and out of the machine.
A quadrupole magnet
How does the AD work ?
Antiparticles have to be created from energy (remember: E = mc2). This energy is obtained with protons that have been previously accelerated in the PS. These protons are smashed into a block of metal, called a target. We use Copper or Iridium targets mainly because they are easy to cool (but a piece of English beef would serve the same purpose - it would just roast very quickly and is rather messy).
Then, the abrupt stopping of such energetic particles releases a huge amount of energy into a small volume, heating it up to such temperatures that matter-antimatter particles are spontaneously created (this is explained in our briefing room).
In about one collision out of a million, an antiproton-proton pair is formed. But given the fact that about 10 trillion protons hit the target (about once per minute), this still makes a good 10 million antiprotons heading towards the AD.
The newly created antiprotons behave like a bunch of wild kids; they are produced almost at the speed of light, but not all of them have exactly the same energy (this is called "energy spread"). Moreover, they run randomly in all directions, also trying to break out 'sideways' ("transverse oscillations"). Bending and focussing magnets make sure they stay on the right track, in the middle of the vacuum pipe, while they begin to race around in the ring.
At each turn, the strong electric fields inside the radio-frequency cavities begin to decelerate the antiprotons. Unfortunately, this deceleration increases the size of their transverse oscillations: if nothing is done to cure that, all antiprotons are lost when they eventually collide with the vacuum pipe.
To avoid that, two methods have been invented: 'stochastic' and 'electron cooling'. Stochastic (or 'random') cooling works best at high speeds (around the speed of light, c), and electron cooling works better at low speed (still fast, but only 10-30 % of c). Their goal is to decrease energy spread and transverse oscillations of the antiproton beam.
Finally, when the antiparticles speed is down to about 10% of the speed of light, the antiprotons squeezed group (called a "bunch") is ready to be ejected. One "deceleration cycle" is over: it has lasted about one minute.
A strong 'kicker' magnet is fired in less than a millionth of a second, and at the next turn, all antiprotons are following a new path, which leads them into the beam pipes of the extraction line. There, additional dipole and quadrupole magnets steer the beam into one of the three experiments.
The AD experiments
Three experiments are installed in the Antiproton Decelerator's experimental hall:
ASACUSA " Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions using Slow Antiprotons";
ATHENA "Antihydrogen Production and Precision Experiments" and
ATRAP "Cold Antihydrogen for Precise Laser Spectroscopy".
ATHENA and ATRAP's goal is to produce antihydrogen in traps, by combining antiprotons delivered by the AD with positrons emitted by a radioactive source.
Antihydrogen atoms were first observed at CERN in 1995, and later (1997) at Fermilab. In both cases they were produced in flight, that means they moved at nearly the speed of light, i.e. much too fast to allow precise measurements on any of their proprieties! They made unique electrical signals in detectors that destroyed them almost immediately after they formed.
Now the idea is to produce slow antihydrogen atoms and store them into "traps", allowing extremely accurate comparisons of the properties of hydrogen and antihydrogen.
ASACUSA, on the other hand, will synthesize "exotic" atoms, in which an electron is replaced by an antiproton. Precise laser spectroscopy of these exotic atoms is expected to reveal lots of information on the behavior of atomic systems.
Schematic of the AD machine and of the three experiments location.
