IMAGINE taking part in a competition where you get to tackle some of the biggest, most fundamental questions in the universe鈥�
Some physicists have been given just such an opportunity. They have a chance to identify some weird and wonderful events that may hold clues to why the universe has mass, and how many dimensions were produced by the big bang.
The competition is being run by a team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator being built at CERN on the French-Swiss border that is due to be switched on in 2007. The LHC will smash protons together with unprecedented energy, creating more 鈥渆vents鈥� per second than any other collider. More than 2000 physicists from 34 countries are due to collaborate on the research, but the competition鈥檚 organisers are concerned that the results could be so enigmatic they won鈥檛 know what to look for.
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So the LHC team has simulated a set of 600,000 results that could conceivably be produced by the collider within a few days. The data describes particle debris created when beams of protons are fired at each other down the LHC鈥檚 tunnels. The goal of the competition is to give the physicists practice at spotting the most significant or intriguing events that have been deliberately hidden within this data set. For example, these could be evidence that confirms the existence of extra dimensions, miniature black holes, or Higgs bosons 鈥� particles that are thought to be the source of mass.
The competition is a precursor to the main event, when the physicists get to study the truly gargantuan set of real data that will be churned out when the LHC is switched on.
Studying such collisions has helped physicists to piece together the rules of the subatomic world, establishing the Standard Model of particle physics. 鈥淏ut the LHC opens up a new energy regime, so you are never sure what you might find,鈥� says Ian Hinchliffe of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who helped to organise the competition. Entries must be in by 7 September and a modest prize will be awarded for the most thorough analysis.