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S05E01 & S05E02: The Skank Reflex Analysis & The Infestation Hypothesis
Some of you may be wondering why two episodes of The Big Bang Theory were broadcast back-to-back tonight. Surely it cannot be a mere coincidence that this is also the first time we have a multi-episode arc on the whiteboards.
Since the beginning of the series, the executive producers have asked me to have Leonard and Sheldon working on solving a real problem on the boards over several episodes. But it wasn’t all that easy. If the boys are working on a known problem with a known solution, then anybody could answer it and spoil the surprise. But if they were working on a known problem with no known solution, there are already hundreds if not thousands of minds working on it, and how could they (meaning I) solve it by season’s end?
Axions: exciting new elementary particles, or a detergent?
We needed a fresh, tractable, problem. And over the summer I had an idea. The idea would allow physicists to make a never-before seen particle. And it could solve the dark matter problem. Perhaps our galaxy is filled with these particles. They would provide the gravitational glue that keeps the galaxy rapidly spinning, but have so weakly interacting they would usually pass through the entire Earth undetected. I thought I found a new way of making a particle that was hypothesized over three decades ago, ”The Axion”.
The Axions’ role in solving the dark matter problem is actually just a nice side effect. These particles were originally conceived in the late 1970′s to give a natural explanation of why the strong nuclear force (a.k.a., quantum chromodynamics) obeys certain symmetries so well-too well. It is a happy accident that axions could also account for all the dark matter in the galaxy. It solves two important unrelated problems at once and if elegance were a guide then theorists would likely consider the matter settled.
But physics is an experimental science and sheer elegance is not enough. The history of physics is filled with ideas that were simple, elegant, and wrong. Physics is an experimental science and we have to find their signature experimentally.
In very dense environments at high temperature, charged particles will start to radiate axions efficiently. The core of the Sun is over 13 million kelvins (over 23 millions degrees Farenheit) and is 150 times the density of water. As shown on the whiteboards’ Feynman diagrams, electrons in this enviroment could produce a detectable number of axions. Because they are so weak they penetrate the entire Sun, leaving in all directions. A rare few strike the Earth.
So all astrophysicists have to do is find them leaving the Sun. CERN is not only home to the Large Hadron Collider, but also a clever telescope that points at the Sun. But this is no ordinary telescope. Physicists need not only to detect these weakly interacting axions efficiently enough to find a signal, but in a way that cannot be mimicked by more mundane processes, called backgrounds. One of the funny behaviors of axions is that inside a strong, uniform magnetic field they will convert into light. Specificially, one axion will convert to one single particle of light, a photon. Because the axions are made in the heat of the core of the Sun they have an energy corresponding to 13 million kelvins. So each photon from a converted axion from the Sun will actually be an energetic X-ray.
Every morning and every evening, astrophysicists at CERN, took a prototype magnet borrowed from the Large Hadron Collider project and pointed it at the Sun. They called their device CAST, the CERN Axion Solar Telescope. If they ever see X-rays emerging from the magnetic field that would be a tell-tale sign of axions. They can check they weren’t seeing local radioactive backgrounds by pointing the telescope away from the Sun. Unfortunately to date they have seen none.
Not Galileo's optics: the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is actually a large magnet pointed at the Sun.
Zillions of axions are wasted in this technique. The Sun would be pouring out axions in all directions, but only those entering the tiny front aperture of the magnet are detectable. That’s an efficiency of about 1 in 1025 axions. And even only a tiny fraction of these would be converted.
This summer I wondered if we could do better. The main problem is the Earth is so far from the Sun. Meanwhile physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California are making an artificial Sun in the laboratory. They aim 192 lasers at a small pellet of heavy water and for a short time they achieve the density and temperatures of the Sun. Exceed it, even. But not just short, but a very short time, about a hundred billionths of a second. They do this amazing feat to copy the fusion power of the Sun, as a clean almost limitless source of energy for us on earth. It is called fusion because the core of Sun converts protons into heavier elements, mostly helium. The particles are fused together into this heavier atomic nucleus, and so is called fusion. Because the resulting nucleus is less massive than the sum of the original protons, by Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, the missing mass is converted to enormous amounts of energy.
When the process is successful, we can think of “burning” hydrogen into helium to release energy, in analogy with how a burning of a log releases energy as heat. The major difference is rather than a chemical reaction which drives fire, this is a nuclear reaction. Nuclear reactions typically release a million times more energy than chemical reactions for a given supply of fuel. The physicists at Lawrence Livermore call the successful implosions “ignition” and built the National Ignition Facility with its 192 powerful lasers to do it.
The National Ignition Facility focuses 192 lasers onto a small pellet, briefly creating an artificial Sun on Earth.
The National Ignition Facility is the prototype for what its physicists think will be a power plant as powerful as the big coal plants or nuclear power plants. Even a 1000 gigawatt plant is still a lot less power than the Sun’s 1017 gigawatts, but we can put the magnet much closer: We could put an axion telescope 10 meters away instead of 150 billion meters away, our distance from the Earth. Since the rate improves as the square of the distance drops, that is a whopping improvement of 1020, more than making up for the lower power.
The numbers looked really good. I was excited. Accounting for distance and power, I reckoned I could do about 1000 times better than the CERN Axion Solar Telescope. That didn’t even account for the fact that the background would be lower since the artificial Sun is only on for 100 billionths of a second, not all day. And since the magnets don’t have to follow the Sun in the sky we could make them much larger. The emission mechanism even looked more efficient than the Sun.
But that’s not the whole story. This was actually a three-episode whiteboard arc. I suppose CBS wanted to create some suspense and the third episode will not be aired until next week. That next episode contains the result of my summer’s worth of calculations. If you think you know the answer, comment below. Otherwise, tune in next week to find out if we are on the verge of creating and detecting axions on Earth.
To be continued…
2012-11-15 09:05:18
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