Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground Designed with mind to send protons around A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride ‘Til in the hearts of the detectors, they’re made to collide And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum And then…
LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find. The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
We see asteroids and planets, stars galore We know a black hole resides at each galaxy’s core But even all that matter cannot explain What holds all these stars together – something else remains This dark matter interacts only through gravity And how do you catch a particle there’s no way to see Take it back to the conservation of energy And the particles appear, clear as can be
You see particles flying, in jets they spray But you notice there ain’t nothin’, goin’ the other way You say, “My law has just been violated – it don’t make sense! There’s gotta be another particle to make this balance.” And it might be dark matter, and for first Time we catch a glimpse of what must fill most of the known ‘Verse. Because…
LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.
Antimatter is sort of like matter’s evil twin Because except for charge and handedness of spin They’re the same for a particle and its anti-self But you can’t store an antiparticle on any shelf Cuz when it meets its normal twin, they both annihilate Matter turns to energy and then it dissipates
When matter is created from energy Which is exactly what they’ll do in the LHC You get matter and antimatter in equal parts And they try to take that back to when the universe starts The Big Bang – back when the matter all exploded But the amount of antimatter was somehow eroded Because when we look around we see that matter abounds But antimatter’s nowhere to be found. That’s why…
LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find. The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
The Higgs Boson – that’s the one that everybody talks about. And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out If the Higgs exists, they ought to see it right away And if it doesn’t, then the scientists will finally say “There is no Higgs! We need new physics to account for why Things have mass. Something in our Standard Model went awry.”
But the Higgs – I still haven’t said just what it does They suppose that particles have mass because There is this Higgs field that extends through all space And some particles slow down while other particles race Straight through like the photon – it has no mass But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its And the Higgs is a boson that carries a force And makes particles take orders from the field that is its source. They’ll detect it….
LHCb sees where the antimatter’s gone ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind They’re looking for whatever new particles they can find.