Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, creative duo Semiconductor turns particle physics into art. Their subject? The moment two bunches of protons travelling close to the speed of light collide, with roughly the same amount of energy as particles had fractions of seconds after the Big Bang.
“Really, what we’re interested in is nature and physical matter,” says Ruth Jarman, one half of Semiconductor. In 2015, Jarman and her collaborator, Joe Gerhardt, spent a three-month artistic residency at CERN, where they spoke with particle physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). “It was a very intense research period,” she says. “We were in the lab every day, delving around and finding out as much as we could.”
The result is Halo, an immersive digital installation that depicts the aftermath of a series of proton bunch collisions. Inside the LHC, a single collision lasts just 25 nanoseconds, but Semiconductor slowed things down by a factor of a billion so every collision plays out in 25 seconds across a 360-degree projection screen. Particles released from proton collisions scatter across the display as dots of light, triggering notes from piano wires suspended floor-to-ceiling in a circle surrounding the screen.
What started as a collision of light particles inside a tunnel near Geneva will end up as a cacophony of musical notes when the work is installed this June at the Art Basel fair in Switzerland. Viewers will be able to walk inside the ten-metre wide vertical cylinder so they are surrounded by the projection.
“It’s another way of looking at the data that is slightly more accessible than just graphs and histograms and reading scientific papers,” says Mark Sutton, a CERN particle physicist who worked with Semiconductor to turn the raw experimental data from the LHC into a form that could be represented on a screen. One of the biggest challenges, he says, was knowing which data could be thrown away. Every second, 40 million proton bunch collisions take place within the LHC’s ATLAS detector. If it were all retained, it would generate so much data it would exceed the world’s storage capacity in just a few days.
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To get around this problem, the ATLAS detector is fitted with triggers that limit the data captured to one thousand bunch collisions per second. Usually, these triggers are programmed to capture only those collisions that are more likely to produce rarely seen particles such as the Higgs boson, which was discovered at CERN in July 2012. But for the dataset used in Halo, the triggers were set to record collisions at random. Halo recreates 60 bunch collisions in total, captured during the LHC’s first run between 2009 and 2013.
“We’ve worked with the data in its rawest form, which basically ends up as white points in space,” says Jarman. On the screen, tens of thousands of points of light – representations of the quarks, electrons, pions and muons formed in the aftermath of a proton collision – rain down, mimicking the way subatomic particles radiate out of the detector after a collision. “Each of these points of light – of data – is then translated into MIDI information so it also plays the strings in the space,” Jarman says. “It becomes like a big musical instrument.”
The Brighton-based pair based Halo’s cylindrical design partly on the the ATLAS detector itself. Inside the detector, the movement of particles is detected by 370,000 tubes filled with xenon gas, with a thin tungsten wire running through the length of each tube. When a particle released from a collision passes through one of these tubes, it ionises the xenon and sends a pulse down the corresponding wire. By comparing pulses from different tubes, physicists can reconstruct the path a particle takes in the millionth of a second before it leaves the detector.
“We’re recreating on a really microscopic scale the conditions of that short amount of time after the Big Bang,” says Sutton. At CERN, work has already started on a major upgrade to the LHC, to be completed by 2026, which will increase the number of proton collisions by between five and ten times. A greater number of collisions will mean more opportunities to study particles like the Higgs boson; in its early runs, the LHC produced around 1.2 million Higgs boson particles a year, and after the upgrade it is expected to increase that to 15 million.
But for Jarman, every proton collision is a work of art. “You don’t need to know what the science experiment is,” she says. “We like to make the work so that it transcends the data and becomes almost like a phenomenon in its own right. You’re experiencing nature, and that does become a quite humbling experience.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
