Just when you thought that all your fears about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were assuaged now here’s something new to fear that I’ve never even heard of…A Bose-Supernova
(Boy, we’re really milking this LHC stuff aren’t we? The stories just keep pouring out.)
These relatively new fears appear to be related to experiments performed in 2001 by Elizabeth Donley and buddies at JILA in Boulder, Colorado. These experiments used magnetic fields to alter the atomic forces between the atoms in a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC). This caused the condensate to first implode, then explode in what’s now referred to as a Bose Supernova or bosenova.
–Series of stills of multiple bosenovas–
A recent physics blog post I read had this to say:
“some clever clogs has pointed out that superfluid helium is a BEC and that the LHC is swimming in 700,000 litres of the stuff. Not only that but the entire thing is bathed in some of the most powerful magnetic fields on the planet.”
(I’ve been informed that “clever clogs” = irritatingly smart people)
So if all this is true, then the LHC could create a huge version of one of these bosenovas and turn Geneva into a huge crater, right?
Well…let’s look at some background first.
What exactly is a Bose Einstein Condensate?
A Bose-Einstein Condensate is generally considered to be the 5th state of matter. It’s existence was first proposed by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein in the 1920s but it took until 1995 for it to be actually created and therefore proved. It is a gas that has been cooled to billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the so-called nano-kelvin regime. (Why does everything sound cooler with nano in the name?)
Ok, so this is about million times colder than anything else in the universe and just about as cold as anything can get. At this temperature, the atoms are at their lowest possible energy state and are moving pretty slowly. This means that we know their velocity with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Who remembers what the uncertainty principle says about this?……Yes, Timmy, you are correct. The more you know a particle’s momentum the less you can know about its position.
Think of each atom’s position as a fuzzy blob of uncertainty. All the fuzzy blobs in a condensate overlap such that no possible measurement can tell them apart. Therefore, the positions of all the atoms are smeared together into one super-atom of sorts. That means that all the atoms occupy the same quantum state and they can all be described by just one wave function. This is essentially a quantum object that has been beefed up to macroscopic size, giving us new insights into the quantum world that we wouldn’t otherwise have. Who knows where these condensates might lead? Atom lasers and quantum computers are just the tip of the iceberg I believe.
–Bose Einstein condensates being created–
So, is this a real threat?
Not according to Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath at CERN:
“We conclude that that there is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforeseen catastrophic explosion,”
I admit, the bosenova scenario happening at the LHC seems a tad more plausible than the LHC creating earth-sucking black holes or strange-matter. There’s much we don’t know about bosenovas (or is it bosenovae?) but it seems clear that for them to occur, a special phenomenon called Feshbach Resonance must happen. This resonance allows magnetic fields to change the atomic interactions which is what causes the explosion. The fact is that this resonance cannot occur with the helium the LHC is using. Therefore, a bosenova will not be created at CERN this spring. End of story.
(yeah, I know…I doubt it too)