Instead of looking for the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle, in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, what if you could listen for it instead?

That's what particle physicist Lily Asquith of University College London and colleagues were thinking about when they created LHCsound, where they convert data from the particle collider into musical notes:

Where do the sounds come from?

The sound samples on this site are made from real and simulated data from the ATLAS detector. Simulated data is used by physicists to determine, for example, what a Higgs Boson decay is going to look like in real data.

How is the data converted into sounds?

The data is first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a "breakpoint file". It can also be used as a "note list". This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project.

Well, reading about it is nice, but listening to the sounds is much more awesome:

Detector sweep on marimba:

Higgs Jet Simple

Higgs Jet Simple Slow Tempo

Detector Sweet with Momentum

Top Quark Jet

Higgs Jet Energy Gate

Apparently, God is a fan of Marimba music.

See also:

I Survive the Large Hadron Collider T-Shirt - $9.95

Following two false starts due to electrical failures, protons whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece around a 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack outside of Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building sized detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the world.

The soundless blooming of proton explosions was accompanied by the hoots and applause of scientists crowded into control rooms at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the collider.

Link -via Boing Boing

See the video. Link

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.

The LHC is scheduled to be reactivated later this month. The bread incident won’t affect those plans. Link -via Boing Boing

Hanks was approached about the move while filming his latest film Angels and Demons in which he plays a Harvard University academic investigating a plot to annihilate the Vatican with 0.25 grams of antimatter stolen from Cern.

Steve Myers, Cern’s director of accelerators and technology, told Nature News that he gave the actor a tour of the laboratory on February 13 and asked him if he would return for the switch-on, to which the actor agreed.

Cern’s head of communications, James Gillies, confirmed that the facility would be delighted to have Hanks there to restart the collider, which organisers hope will take place in June.

Link -via Gizmodo

Previously: Trouble at the LHC

This means we still have the chance to enjoy the LHC photo gallery over at Dvice, containing 30 stunning images from the world’s largest particle accelerator complex.

Link