It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives – electromagnetism and the weak force – are united. The research doesn’t just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin.
This year, scientists have taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay.
Last year, the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy – in the form of electromagnetic waves. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) plays with Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc², to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. Note: This article was originally published by Symmetry magazine.
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