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The Universe and everything and in it, the Earth, we humans, all the life around us, and all the
inanimate objects like the TV or computer you're watching this video on
are made from elementary particles of matter.
The Universe and all matter was created roughly fourteen billion years ago by giant burst of energy -
The Big ***.
At a research complex near the western end of Lake Geneva, straddling the border between
France and Switzerland sits CERN, the European organization for particle physics research.
Thousands of researchers from all over the world have come to CERN.
The focus of their attention is the Large Hadron Collider.
The LHC has just inaugurated its seventh experiment, MoEDAL.
The LHC ring is 27 kilometers in circumference and houses thousands of magnets
that guide counter rotating beams of protons into collisions
that generate the unprecedented energy of 14,000,000,000,000 electron volts per collision.
The LHC ring lies 100m underground.
The protons travel in opposing directions and accelerate to collision energy which is close
to the speed of light.
The MoEDAL collaboration has built a detector to search for the magnetic monopole, a hypothetical
particle with a magnetic charge,
the discovery of which would be of fundamental importance.
The monopole detector consists of an array of 400 modules, each consisting of a stack of 10 sheets of plastic.
The total area of plastic is 250 square metres.
The MoEDAL detector is essentially a giant camera
waiting to photograph the telltale signs of new physics,
the plastic detectors are it's film.
The proton beams collide, recreating, quite literally, a tiny big ***.
If magnetic monopoles exist, they will be created in this fireball, rushing away from
its fiery centre like shrapnel from a bomb,
the trajectory to be recorded by the detector.
The magnitude monopoles will rip through the plastic sheets of the detector, breaking
through it's long chain molecules, creating a minute trail of damage through all 10 sheets
of plastic.
The path of damage in the plastic sheets is revealed by the process of etching in
a caustic solution of hot sodium hydroxide.
The etch cones on either side of the plastic are formed as the etchant eats aways at the
magnetic monopole's path.
Eventually the two cones meet to form a hole.
The clear indication of the path of a monopole is an aligned set of holes, with the trajectory
pointing back to the collision point. Just one event like this could herald the existence
of the magnetic monopole
and revolutionized our understanding of the physical universe.