THE HIGGS MECHANIC

摘要

It was standing room only in the auditorium at CERN on 13 December, when physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented the best indications yet that the long-sought-after Higgs boson might have been found. But the man who keeps the particles colliding was absent. Mike Lamont heads the LHC operations group, which was holding its own workshop on the machine's function. The group of about 80 engineers staffs the LHC control room in shifts and coordinates hundreds of others working on the superconducting magnets, accelerating chambers and other equipment arrayed around the LHC's 27-kilometre ring near Geneva, Switzerland, all to keep the data flowing without overtaxing the machine.