Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have developed a way toconvert subatomic particle collision into sound. With this method they hope that it will resulteasier to detect the elusive and hypothetical Higg bosons, also known as a God particle. Dr. Lily Asquith, who has participated in the project, worked with sound engineers to convert the data generated by the collisions into sounds, a process that is calledsonificación. “If the energy is close to you you will hear a low tone and if it is far from you you will hear a high tone” he clarifies.
Specifically, the sound measurement was carried outin the Atlas experiment. Inside it is acalorimeter, which is used to measure energy and iscomposed of seven concentric layers. Each layer is represented by a noteand the tone of each of these differs according to the amount of energy that is deposited in that layer.
“When you listen to what the sonifications do, you are really listening to the scientific data. They are authentic, and they are telling you something about the data that you would not know otherwise,” says Archer Endrich, a software engineer working on the project.
The objective isprovide LHC physicists with another way to analyze their data. The sonification team believes that the ears are better adapted than the eyes to detect subtle changes that could indicate the presence of a new particle.
Richard Dobson, a composer who is also involved in the project, claims to be surprised by the musicality of the sound of the collisions. “They seem to tell a story. Not very dynamic and they change all the time, and they sound like the music we hear in contemporary compositions,” he adds.
(You can hear the sounds of the LHC inwww.lhcsound.com)
