Pyramids, dark matter & the Big Bang theory - What’s holding our universe together? | DW Documentary

Our

universe

, our planet Earth and even ourselves, everything is made up of the same components: elementary particles. If we take a person and a chair and break them down into their components, we find atoms and within them electrons, quarks and gluons. Without elementary particles there would be no stable atoms. Everything would fall apart. They literally hold the world

together

. Elementary particles are not only the basic building block of all

matter

, some can even penetrate any form of

matter

. Hamburg is home to DESY, the German electron synchrotron, one of the largest fundamental physics research centers in the world.

More than 2,000 scientists from more than 40 countries work here. Particle physicist Christian Schwanenberger takes us into the massive tunnel system beneath the DESY compound. Schwanenberger is one of the world's most renowned particle physicists, professor at the University of Hamburg and principal scientist at DESY. As only some parts of the tunnel are still used for experiments, our team can film there. We will go underground to the HERA accelerator. It is the largest accelerator Germany has ever built. Anyone entering the tunnel needs an oxygen unit for safety reasons and must report by phone. “Christian Schwanenberger, hello. I am entering the HERA tunnel at HERA-West, heading towards HERA-North.

Behind the door lies the heart of DESY particle physics: the HERA tunnel. HERA stands for Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator. HERA is so long that you need a bicycle to get from one experiment to another. And you can see that it's not actually a ring. Now we are on a straight stretch. Electrons and protons are accelerated through these straight sections. Here the tunnel begins to curve slowly. The particle beams are not accelerated in this section, they are only redirected. The proton beam travels through the large upper vacuum tube and the electron beam passes through the lower storage ring in the opposite direction.

And if we traveled much, much further, we would eventually get out of the loop and see this electron tube merge with the proton tube. Electrons are fired at protons in the next detector. The protons explode and release new elementary particles. The goal of physics with these particle collisions is the reconstruction of the beginning of space and time: the reconstruction of the Big Bang. Our

universe

emerged from a huge explosion about 13.8 billion years ago. Particle physics has not yet been able to determine the exact moment. But it can date back to a millionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

The debate over whether indivisible particles could exist dates back to the ancient Greeks, about 25,000 years ago. The Greek philosopher Democritus, among others, called them atoms, from the ancient Greek “átomos,” meaning “indivisible.” The debate continued until 1911, when it was first demonstrated experimentally that atoms themselves are divisible. Atoms are made up of electrons, neutrons and protons. The term “elementary particles” first appeared in the 1930s. In the second half of the 20th century, teams from the USA and DESY in Hamburg, among others, were finally able to demonstrate that protons and neutrons also They are divisible and are composed of quarks and gluons.

The Standard Model of particle physics lists 4 groups of known elementary particles. The quark group consists of 6 particles in total. Leptons, including electrons and muons, also consist of 6 particles. The group of gauge bosons, the force particles, currently includes four types, including gluons and photons. Finally, there are scalar bosons. So far, physics knows only one elementary particle from this group: the Higgs boson. Detected in 2012, it is the most recent addition to the particle family. Sedan. At the Neues Museum we meet Verena Lepper, curator of Egyptian and Oriental papyri. She takes us to the papyrus collection. Some of the Eastern and ancient Egyptian manuscripts on display here were originally rolled or folded, like these amulets.

Until now, they had to be carefully unrolled and unfolded by hand. Papyri are very fragile. When we want to open a piece, our papyrus conservator decides if it is possible or if a package like this, for example, falls apart into a thousand pieces. Of course we don't want that. Some 60,000 papyri and other manuscripts are kept in excavation boxes from 1907. At that time, huge quantities of these artifacts were found during excavations on Elephantine Island in the Nile River. Verena Lepper,

together

with conservator Sophie-Elisabeth Breternitz, is searching for papyri whose contents can be deciphered using particle physics without being unfolded or damaged. .

Using a portable This is done at the Helmholtz Center for Materials and Energy in Berlin's Wannsee district. Tobias Arlt specializes in tomographic imaging of a wide range of materials. For the Egyptian Museum papyrus package he draws on the pioneering research of a well-known German physicist. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays at the end of the 19th century. Shortly afterward he managed to capture the first images, revolutionizing medical diagnosis and earning him the Nobel Prize in Physics. For the first time it was possible to visualize the bone structure of a living being without surgical intervention. The principle is relatively simple: X-rays are produced by the rapid acceleration of electrons, that is, elementary particles.

The denser the material, the less radiation can penetrate it. Very dense material, such as bone, appears white on the x-ray. Fluids and soft tissues such as fat or muscle are less dense and therefore appear gray. Organs that contain large amounts of air, such as the lungs, let the most rays through and appear black in the image. While X-rays can be harmful to living things, they have long been a proven tool for non-destructive testing in materials research. The X-rays pass through this fragment and then hit the detector. And we took a whole series of images, not just one.

We rotated the sample once 360 ​​degrees and recorded a projection at many, very different angles. In this way we can generate a three-dimensional reconstruction of the volume. The scan only lasts a few minutes and provides numerous three-dimensional X-ray images of the papyrus bundle. But the writing inside still cannot be read. This is where scientists from the Zuse Institute in Berlin come in. Mathematician Daniel Baum and his team have developed software that can virtually display the papyrus package. With the mouse trace the individual layers of the 3D model. The computer program then virtually assembles the numerous X-ray images onto a flat surface.

The structure of plant fibers is clearly visible. Finally, the X-ray image data is transferred to the almost unfolded papyrus and different characters appear on the screen. You can see the papyrus fibers very well! Verena Lepper is fluent in 15 Eastern scripts and languages ​​from different eras, including Hieratic or Coptic, Aramaic and Arabic. For the first time in the history of papyrus research, we can read a papyrus virtually without having to physically open it. This is really sensational. This piece here is a Coptic text. Here is a “P,” which is the masculine article, then this symbol, not Greek but Coptic.

This spells "Pejoy" and means "Oh Lord." Jesus Christ. This is the short form of Lord Jesus Christ in early Christianity and a wonderful example of the fact that early Christianity and personal piety existed in Elephantine, perhaps as early as the 4th century. Remember, this was a folded amulet that someone would have carried with them. Thanks to physics and computer science, some aspects of the early history of Christianity can now be rewritten. Geneva. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is the world's largest research center in the field of particle physics. Here, on the Swiss border with France, almost 20,000 scientists from all over the world have been researching the properties of elementary particles since 1954.

We meet again with German particle physicist Christian Schwanenberger at CERN. He is regularly in Switzerland to follow the experiments. This is an overview of the Large Hadron Collider. We are here at the CERN site. At the core of CERN is the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator. The ring-shaped tunnel is located almost 100 meters underground. It really all starts with a hydrogen bottle. Hydrogen consists of a proton and an electron. First the electron is extracted and then the proton passes to a linear accelerator, where its energy increases to half the speed of light. The proton then passes through three more pre-accelerators before finally being directed to the Large Hadron Collider, where it is accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

In the collider, protons are accelerated in opposite directions and shoot at each other at 4 points on the ring at almost the speed of light. Four huge detectors measure collisions. One of them, called the CMS detector, is located directly opposite the CERN site, on the other side of the ring. That's where we go now. CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid and is one of the most interesting physics experiments of our time. Here, in the CMS control room, the collisions of the experiment are coordinated and monitored. Other physicists around the world are connected in real time, including a scientific team from DESY in Hamburg.

Hello Hamburg. Hello. Some 4,000 researchers from 55 countries around the world participate in the CMS experiment. The CMS experiment is conducted at the Large Hadron Collider and is an experiment to observe the fundamental components of matter, understand the fundamental forces of the universe, and learn more about how the universe was created. It is held at CERN because CERN has the most powerful accelerator in the world at the moment and it is also a community that brings together institutes from around the world and their expertise to really advance the field of particle physics. In 2012, CERN researchers achieved their biggest success to date: experimental testing of the long-sought Higgs boson.

It is named after the British physicist Peter Higgs, who, together with his French colleague Francois Englert, described the properties of the still unknown particle. They jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Today it is something unusual. Proton collisions in the underground tunnel have been stopped for maintenance work on the LHC or its detectors. This is a diagram of the CMS detector. Normally, the protons would be colliding in the center of the detector at this time. But at this moment there are no protons in the collider. Instead,

what

we see here are these particles, which are called cosmic muons and are produced in cosmic rays.

They pass linearly through the detector. So if the detector reconstructed something non-linear, then we would know it was misaligned and needed to be corrected. That's why we use these cosmic muons to calibrate our detectors very precisely. Since there are no particle collisions today, we are allowed to enter the detector room, 100 meters deep. Otherwise, this would not be possible, since harmful radiation could be released during operation. The CMS detector here is the heaviest detector in high energy physics. It is 65% heavier than the Eiffel Tower. What we can't see is that the protons come from here and also from behind and then collide in the middle of the detector.

When they collide they practically explode and then we analyze the fragments. Proton collisions release new elementary particles, such as bosons, leptons and quarks, which can then be measured in the CMS detector. By identifying the particles produced in each collision, measuring their moments, trajectories and energies, and then putting all the information together, scientists can recreate and describe

what

really happens during the collision. And in the end this allows me to better study the microcosm of the particle. It's fascinating that the more you learn about its microcosm, the more you understand the big picture, the origin of the universe.

When two protons collide, for a fraction of a second the collision recreates the conditions of the Big Bang. We can simulate these quarks and gluons swimming in this cosmic soup by shooting protons at each other with incredibly high energy. It's like traveling back in time to the origins of our universe. When the protons collide, the elementary particles shooting in all directions leave their traces on the different segments of the detector. And these footprints translate into enormous volumes of digital data. Everything happens in this underground computer room where all the data from the CMS detector is received.

Imagine, packets composed of 100 billion protons are fired in the CMS detector. Not one, but 40 million packets per second. In each collision of these packets, about 60 protons collide with other protons and the impacts releasehundreds or thousands of particles. All of these different particles are recorded by the detector. And in this room all these physical signals from the collisions are digitized in the detector. This avalanche of data is so large that we have to pre-select and filter the information we cannot use, otherwise we cannot store it all. The Pyramids of Giza, just outside the Egyptian capital Cairo, were built to stand for eternity and, in fact, are the only remaining wonder of the ancient world.

How many chambers are hidden inside the 3

pyramids

remains a mystery. Three main chambers, among others, have already been discovered, but researchers are sure there must be more. Perhaps even the body and funerary artifacts of Pharaoh Cheops will be found? Since 2015, teams of researchers from Japan and France have used particle physics to study the three

pyramids

of Giza. Using muon imaging, they are reconstructing its internal structure without damaging a single stone. In the standard model of particle physics, muons belong to the group of leptons. Muons form in the upper layers of the atmosphere when cosmic radiation particles collide with air molecules.

The particles, which travel at almost the speed of light, penetrate even large masses of stone. Every minute, at sea level, around 10,000 muons impact every square meter of Earth. The scanners detect muons that are constantly running through the structure. Those who pass through many stone blocks lose a lot of energy and leave a relatively weak trace on the scanners. But if muons flow through the hollow space, they lose less energy and form a stronger image on scanners. In this way, they reveal the internal structure of the pyramids and help to discover treasure chambers and other previously hidden rooms without having to move a single stone.

In 2017, research teams made a spectacular discovery using muon imaging: a previously unknown 30-meter-long chamber in the Great Pyramid. Muon scanning has also proven useful in the inspection of the contaminated Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan. Engineers can examine the condition and integrity of the power plant's outer layer from a greater distance, without having to physically enter the immediate, highly radioactive area. Muon imaging is also used in volcanology, where the flow of elementary particles reveals the underground structure of volcanoes. This allows a kind of early warning system for possible volcanic eruptions. But the flow of elementary particles can not only illuminate matter, but also transmit information.

Mobile phones are based on a 19th century discovery: they send and receive electromagnetic waves that, thanks to particle physics, we know are also elementary particles: photons. Mobile phones work using the electromagnetic force described in the standard model of particle physics. The silicon sensors in mobile phones are based on the same principle as the CERN detectors. Hamburg. The Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine, just north of the docks, is a research center where more than 400 scientists research dangerous pathogens. For example, they study the exact structure of viruses using very high intensity X-ray technology. Maria Rosenthal investigates the structure of Bunya viruses, a group of dangerous pathogens introduced long ago to Central Europe by exotic insects.

A Bunya infection, such as Lassa virus, can be fatal and there are currently no effective vaccines or medications. For this reason, it is necessary to completely decode the molecular structure of Bunya viruses. First we have to generate the biological sample for examination. For example, we need protein crystals for X-ray analysis because a single protein is not enough. The sample must meet certain conditions for crystallization to be possible. We can easily see cells with a normal light microscope, but we cannot see proteins. For this we need particle physics, which helps us make even the smallest atomic units visible.

The cell cultures are shaken for 2 days at about 27 degrees to supply them with as much oxygen as possible. This is important for protein production. Maria Rosenthal checks under the optical microscope whether the samples are suitable for further analysis. If a bright green signal forms in the cells, then the desired protein has been produced. Before the sample can be examined in a particle accelerator, the proteins are sorted by size. Here we can see the separation of the proteins quite clearly. This protein signal is shown in blue. It is a strong and pleasant signal. And our target protein is at its peak here.

This way we can select the tubes where the target protein is well separated from all the others. That will be our pure sample and we can continue working with it. In the final step, the target protein from the cold chamber is mixed with various chemicals to grow protein crystals. This may take days or weeks. Since proteins are not visible under an optical microscope, we need X-ray crystallography to see these proteins, these building blocks of viruses, in the finest detail. These are the protein crystals that have formed. They vary in size and have very nice straight edges, demonstrating their high quality.

Using a kind of miniature lasso, he takes out the best crystals and stores them in a container filled with liquid nitrogen. Maria Rosenthal then takes them to DESY, the German electron synchrotron, in the west of Hamburg. The Center for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) is also located here. In the field of infection biology, research teams from biology, chemistry, medicine and physics work here. Right next to the CSSB building is a huge experiment room. It is connected directly to a particle accelerator: the third generation of the electron-positron tandem ring accelerator. PETRA 3 for short. PETRA 3 is a particle accelerator and one of the most powerful X-ray generators in the world.

It allows researchers to examine the smallest samples, such as the tiny crystals from the Bernhard Nocht Institute. The Mainz-based company BionTech has also used PETRA 3 to investigate the efficacy and messaging capacity of RNA vaccines. Packets of electrons fly through the 2.3-kilometer particle accelerator ring at near the speed of light. Special magnets force them to follow a meandering path, causing them to emit highly focused, high-intensity X-rays. These X-rays are millions of times more intense than those from conventional sources and up to 5,000 times finer than a human hair. The X-rays pass through around 50 measuring stations in several experiment rooms, where the sample from the Bernhard Nocht Institute is now being further examined.

Here Maria Rosenthal meets with structural biologist Christian Löw. Hello! Hello Maria, did you find my sample? Yes, and I have even prepared it. Super! Christian Löw investigates how the human body absorbs and transports nutrients and medicines. He uses crystallography to study the structures of the molecules responsible for transport. This is how protein crystallography works: in order to visualize the three-dimensional structure of proteins with precision at the atomic level, highly focused X-rays are emitted through the rotating grown crystal. Regularly arranged crystal structures bend X-rays and create a characteristic pattern on a detector. The three-dimensional structure of the protein can be determined from the position and intensity of the different points of light produced.

Knowledge of the structure can now help develop new drugs that target precisely the places where pathogens like the Bunya virus are vulnerable. Samples from the Bernhard Nocht Institute were measured and the radiation collected in the detector was converted into a 3D structural animation. Protein crystallography has greatly advanced and accelerated the research of Maria Rosenthal and Christian Löw. It is possible to develop a drug simply by seeing if it inhibits the growth of the virus in cells. But it's time-consuming, and there's usually no real understanding of why a drug works the way it does. In our case, using elementary particles, we can know exactly how a drug works or design a drug to stop certain mechanisms.

Developing a drug of this type is one of Christian Löw's missions. Atomically precise protein images help you tremendously because messenger proteins direct drugs to the parts of the body where the active ingredient is supposed to work. The methods available here on campus, and PETRA 3 in particular, made it possible to investigate these messaging systems in the first place. We work with tiny crystals and only with the powerful X-ray beam can we determine their structures. The development of these methods has been an absolute milestone for structural biology and, in the long term, is essential to develop small molecules that combat specific proteins.

The precision of crystallography measurements is helping researchers keep pace with the rapid spread of previously uninvestigated viruses. Just a few hundred meters away, at DESY, we meet particle physicist Christian Schwanenberger again. He and his team are analyzing data from particle collisions at CERN in Geneva, where protons collide again. The Hamburg team is connected by video to the control room of the CMS experiment. The Schwanenberger team in Germany now continually checks the quality of crash data from Switzerland. We are now seeing live images of data collection in the CMS experiment. The protons collided here, in the center of the detector.

And all these particles, fragments of the collision, have left many traces in the detector. Just like an airplane leaves a trail of condensation in the sky. These are the green lines here. These red and blue dots represent the measured energy of the particles. In these precision analyses, data on known elementary particles are separated from what could possibly indicate new particles. And not only that. We do both. We precisely measure the particles we know and try to learn from the deviations we find. But we're also actively looking for new particles that can help explain things. Like the fact that 85% of the universe is

dark

matter and only 15% is known matter, atoms and molecules.

Like in this jar. I put black beans for the

dark

matter and white beans for the known matter. Everything that is black is what we do not understand. That's dark matter. And that's what we're looking for. It is one of the greatest mysteries of science. But what exactly is this dark matter that particle physicists like Christian Schwanenberger are looking for? In numerous experiments, physicists have already shown that dark matter exists and that it constitutes 85% of all matter in the universe. But they have no idea what it's made of. The search for dark matter is the search for what holds our entire universe together.

Because without it, our galaxy, for example the Milky Way, would disintegrate. Planets revolve around their star, whose gravitational mass keeps them in their orbits. The stars, in turn, orbit around the center of their galaxy. In

theory

, the farther a celestial body is from its center of gravity, the slower it should move. But measurements have shown that the outer stars of the Milky Way are moving much faster than expected or calculated. Astrophysics explains it this way: our galaxy is made up of much more matter than is visible. And this invisible matter, or dark matter, also exerts a gravitational pull on celestial bodies, so they can move faster without deviating from their orbit.

Researchers use various methods to search for still-unknown dark matter particles, not only with underground detectors and particle accelerators, but also with telescopes in space. In the search for dark matter there is even an experiment in which light must pass through a solid wall. Axel Lindner directs the ALPS experiment, which is installed in a straight section of about 300 meters in length of the HERA tunnel in DESY, Hamburg. ALPS stands for Any Light Particle Search. Lindner is a particle physicist at DESY and designs novel particle physics experiments. A team of over 200 specialists has developed and built the entire ALPS facility at DESY over a period of 12 years.

This is the first experiment worldwide in which very light dark matter particles could be produced and detected in the laboratory. To do this, the light would have to pass through an opaque wall, which is technically impossible. We are trying to find something completely new: dark matter. And we do it by trying things that really shouldn't work. Like this: we illuminate a wall with a flashlight and usually nothing happens. We use much more elaborate methods. And if a littlelight passes through the wall, then we can only explain it by the existence of a new form of matter, dark matter.

So we are examining what we think is impossible to see if it is possible after all. If so, we will have found something completely new. In the ALPS experiment, the laser light will be amplified by a factor of 10,000 in a kind of microchamber. The light will then pass through a strong magnetic field. In

theory

, a photon, or light particle, could be transformed into an “axion,” as the new elementary particle will be called if it can be detected. The laser light would be stopped by the wall. But the “axion” would simply pass because nothing can stop dark matter.

In the magnetic field on the other side, the axion should transform back into a photon or light. A detector would measure the particle of light that appears to have passed through the wall. Transformations, if they occur, would be extremely rare. Therefore, the detector must be able to recognize a few photons per day. If it succeeds, a new dark matter particle will have been found, which would be a sensational discovery. For me, success is the fulfillment of a technological objective. So I am very confident that our ALPS experiment will be successful. Only Nature can decide if we will find dark matter.

No one knows how long it will take to solve the mystery of dark matter... But the large number of particle physics experiments around the world makes new discoveries increasingly likely... With very tangible benefits. If we look back, we see that what really holds our world together (electricity, electromagnetic waves, the Internet, X-rays) came from completely implausible and innovative research on completely new things. As a particle physicist, it is sometimes difficult to explain what you are actually doing. You can't hear the particles, you can't see them. You can't taste or smell them. But I still think it is important to investigate these elementary particles.

Ultimately, it is the only way to understand where we come from. Physics is neither more nor less than applied or practical philosophy. We can explain the world, we know how to approach it. It's already working brilliantly. We apply precision cosmology and precision particle physics. Dark matter is still a missing piece. But then we will have a complete picture of how we really came into the world. And that is the fundamental question of philosophy. The fascinating thing about particle physics is that we can describe this complex matter, everything around us, in terms of elementary particles. And you almost think that someone must have been intelligent enough to formulate our world, the world of elementary particles, relatively simple.

Almost as planned.