UK-built processor for CERN experiment

 

A British-built 'brain,' which will power one of the four experiments to discover the secrets of our universe, has been installed.

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The Central Trigger Processor (CTP) was last week added to the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) cavern some 150 feet underground at CERN in Geneva.
 
ALICE is one of the four main experiments which will begin once the world's largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is completed next year.
 
"The CTP is essentially the electronic brain of the whole ALICE experiment," said Dr David Evans of the University of Birmingham.
 
"It can receive up to 60 input signals from various sub-detectors and sensors every 25 nanoseconds (25 billionths of a second) and make complex decisions in less than 100ns (a tenth of a millionth of a second).
 
"The CTP decides if an interesting particle collision has taken place and tells the many sub-detectors of ALICE whether to collect the data or not." 
 
The ALICE experiment will probe the mysteries surrounding the structure of matter, studying the physics from ultra-high energy proton-proton and lead-lead interactions.

The first instants of the Universe

ALICE will also explore conditions in the first instants of the Universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang, when matter was in its primordial state, a 'soup' of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons.
 
Head-on collisions of lead nuclei at the LHC will create sub-atomic sized fireballs with huge temperatures and densities and recreate the conditions that existed less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
 
"These 'mini Big Bangs' will produce temperatures of over a trillion degrees - 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun – and neutrons and protons (which make up the nuclei of atoms) are expected to 'melt' into a new state of matter – the quark-gluon plasma," explained Dr Evans.
 
"By studying this we hope to learn more about the force that holds atomic nuclei together (the strong force), the origin of the mass of nuclear matter and much, much more."
 
The Birmingham group and the UK subscription to CERN are funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
 

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