• Question: What size are the particles that you smash together in the large hadron collider, and what are they measured in?

    Asked by lisaloo to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 18 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      I’m sure Claire is better to answer this, but here goes:

      A proton is a fairly standard particle that makes up the nucleus of an atom (together with neutrons). These are about a femtometre wide – that’s 0.000000000000001 metres (10^-15 if you know standard form, which is super useful in science – ask your teacher). There are plenty of particles smaller than this.

      There are various ways to detect particles. One way to do it is to pass the particles through two charged plates that make sparks as the particles pass, so that you can detect where they go by where the sparks happen. But I suspect people have cleverer ways to detect particles now!

Comments

  • Photo: lisaloo

    lisaloo commented on :

    Is a femtometere bigger or smaller than a nanometer? I think that it is smaller?

  • Photo: Sam

    Sam commented on :

    Smaller! A nanometre is 0.[8 zeroes]1 and a femtometre is 0.[14 zeros]1. So a femtometre is a million times smaller. A nanometre is about the width of a DNA helix (2 nanometres), a single “gate” on a computer processor (5 nanometres or so), or the thickness of a cell membrane (about 8 nanometres)