Author: Nancy Shute / Source: Science News
When I think of an experiment, I think of some flasks, a pipette, maybe an incubator. But to a particle physicist, an experiment can be a machine bigger than a house, designed to study subatomic particles.
There’s a certain charm to the fact that such vast equipment has to be constructed to study the smallest known bits of matter.
The tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider has a circumference of almost 27 kilometers. And KATRIN, an experiment in Karlsruhe, Germany, described by physics writer Emily Conover in this issue, requires a blimplike metal tank that’s wider than some of the neighborhood streets.Conover knows firsthand the exacting work of building a physics experiment. While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Conover toiled away on Double Chooz. The experiment was…
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