This week I'm talking about hacking
particle accelerators! Essentially
modifying powerful subatomic particle
smashers to do weird and awesome things
they weren't originally intended to do.
Particle accelerators are machines that
are capable of accelerating tiny
subatomic particles to extreme speeds:
zero to sixty thousand miles per hour in
a fraction of a second and then almost
to the speed of light using electric
fields and magnets to steer and focus
them. The most powerful particle
accelerators, ones you've probably heard
of like the Large Hadron Collider, are
typically used to study the nature of
the universe; recreating mini versions of
things like black holes, supernovas, or
even things similar to the Big Bang. So
what do we do with all the old particle
accelerators that can no longer keep
pace with the new ones? Oftentimes these
are miles long accelerators, huge amounts
of infrastructure, and are actually too
expensive to even demolish so they end
up just getting abandoned. But there's a
growing trend to hacking these old
particle accelerators to do
unconventional things things like making
movies of how photosynthesis works at
the molecular level. This is happening at
SLAC, a particle accelerator that was
originally built to study the nature of
protons and subsequently ended up
discovering quarks. A few years ago
people hacked the particle accelerator
at SLAC to do something new. For decades
particle physicists had been annoyed
that electrons emit x-rays when they
change direction. Somewhere along the way
people ended up figuring out though that
these tiny, little, annoying x-rays that
are nanometers in size could end up
acting like tiny flashlights or tiny
high-speed cameras in order to image
things that are only nanometers in size.
Wielding this new sort of accidental
hack of electrons brought about an
entirely new era that we live in today
of x-ray lasers, in the form of electron
guns and wigglers, essentially things
that cause the electrons to wiggle on
purpose thus emitting x-rays on purpose.
These tiny controllable x-rays are
what's enabling awesome new uses of
particle accelerators. Things like
looking at photosynthesis and making
movies of how photosynthesis actually
works at an incredibly tiny level, which
requires the collaboration between
biologists and physicists which is
totally awesome because that's not
something that happens all the time,
and also really helping us understand
how we might one day create artificial
photosynthesis, which would be really
useful. They may even be tapping into, the
plants, I mean, tapping into quantum
entanglement in order to produce really
efficient photosynthesis. So there's
still a lot that we can learn about how
photosynthesis happens and how we can
apply it to our own uses. This technique
of using tiny x-ray flashlights at
SLAC is also being used to determine,
actually confirm, the likelihood that
planets Neptune and Uranus produce
diamond rain, which is incredibly awesome.
By simulating the conditions of Neptune
inside the accelerator, researchers could
actually see the diamonds forming at the
nanometer scale. Of course, on Neptune or
Uranus these diamonds are actually
probably going to be millions of carats
in weight but it's still incredibly
cool to be able to see it here on Earth.
Similar techniques are also being used
at the Swiss Light Source particle
accelerator to get incredibly detailed
3D images of how a fly uses its muscles
to flap its wings 50 times a second,
which could be very useful if we ever
want to create fly mimicking little
robots. Particle accelerators are
increasingly being used to do
interesting things like determine if
there are paintings underneath paintings,
or find old operas from 200 years ago.
And there are even more awesome things
like the fact that the Louvre has a
particle accelerator underneath it! Yeah!
The Louvre in Paris, the museum in Paris,
has a particle accelerator underneath it
and it uses it to get different
information about artifacts at the
museum: how old they are and what they're
made of. By directing a beam of cesium
ions at an artifact they can then see
what atoms get ejected out as a result
and they can count how many unstable
carbon atoms there are versus how many
stable carbon atoms there are and that
ratio tells them how old the artifact is.
Equally during this process, looking for
isotopes like beryllium-10 or aluminum-26 can also tell how long an artifact
has been left out on the surface of the
earth, essentially exposed to cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays regularly rain down on
Earth's surface and by looking for rare
isotopes we can determine how old are,
not how old, but actually how long, an
artifact
has been out on the surface of the earth.
This technique of looking for rare
isotopes to determine how long things
have been bombarded by cosmic rays is
also helping us in looking at glacier
history in Antarctica and Greenland and
elsewhere. By looking at rocks that have
been exposed to the surface we can also
see how long they've been exposed to the
surface because at one point they were
covered by a glacier that was protecting
them from cosmic rays.
So from demystifying photosynthesis to
recreating diamond rain inside of
Neptune to unlocking the mysteries of
how a fly actually flies to tracking the
history of glaciers, these are just a few
of the reasons that I think hacking
particle accelerators is so incredibly
exciting. Thanks so much for watching
this week, Space Friends! Remember to
subscribe on YouTube and actually check
out the description this week; I'll be
linking to a lot of the things that I
mentioned in this video. And also
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