“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commissions or revenue from certain merchandise through these links.”
As you read this story, you will learn the following:
-
CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron will turn 50 in 2026 – and it has a resonant ghost.
-
Physicists used mathematics to measure and model how these resonant lines intersect.
-
Modeling 3D shapes over time requires systems of 4D equations.
In research published in journals natural physicsScientists from CERN in Switzerland and Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, announced that they have isolated a resonance “ghost” that affects the behavior of particles inside the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).
It is a 3D shape that changes over time, which means it is best measured in 4D. This secret is the same reason you spill your coffee when walking back to your desk, or bounce your friend off the trampoline.
The SPS is a nearly four-mile-wide ring that dates back to the 1970s. It sounds like ancient history, but SPS remains vital at CERN. In 2019, it got an upgraded “beam collector,” which is like a runaway truck ramp for high-power beams inside the SPS. So when researchers noticed ghosts in the machines, so to speak, they knew mapping and understanding would be important for future work.
Ghosting is caused by resonance. When objects have energy and create waves, these waves can interact and create strange little trajectories in which the energy is amplified. As you walk with your coffee, each step creates waves in the liquid that eventually meet each other and spill out. On a trampoline, one person “jumps into” another person’s jump and resonates to jump higher. In SPS, harmonic coffee overflow means losing necessary photons, the so-called beam attenuation.
“In accelerator physics, an understanding of resonances and nonlinear dynamics is crucial to avoid beam particle losses,” the scientists explain in the paper. As the problem in question acquires more moving parts and more “degrees of freedom,” it becomes increasingly complex. Each moving part, including connectors, generates its own vibrations.
Beam degradation is a huge problem, especially as the proton beams involved become increasingly energetic and powerful. Harmonics in complex systems can affect any experiment where particles interact within a vessel, such as nuclear fusion research in tokamak. Therefore, harmonic interference is also a huge problem in achieving efficient nuclear fusion, which can create dead spots and cause the energy flow to lose important thermal energy.
Inside SPS, particles have only two degrees of freedom, which is not as complicated as it sounds. Like photons within a fiber optic line, these SLS photons propagate throughout the path. But they can also “bounce” within that path because even narrow beams or cables still have thickness. The SPS isn’t a thick donut, but it’s still a real-life donut, not a circle like one of the geometry book illustrations.
And this “rebound” is distorted due to human factors and realistic factors. SPS may be one of the most advanced facilities in the world, but everything in science must be made in the facilities we have. The magnets that power these facilities are not perfect, and even small fluctuations in magnetism can cause resonance. To quantify this, the researchers took measurements around the SPS ring and used the data to build a mathematical model called the Poincaré cross section.
in a Poincaré Sectionyou stabilize an element (in this case, a “fixed line” as the researchers refer to it in the paper) and step through a system, mapping all intersections of other elements until a complete “surface” is formed. The result is like an MRI, but for a dynamic system the shape may change with each step, in which case time is added as a fourth dimension. Since resonances in closed systems like SPS eventually repeat, 4D surface studies can be played on a loop like a well-produced GIF.
In mathematics, the team found that fixed lines can predict where particles will cluster. By spending time studying and simulating this phenomenon, they hope to help researchers develop strategies to suppress the effects of these fixed harmonic lines.
The work could also help those building new particle accelerators avoid creating magnet “ghosts” in the first place, which could save significant money by keeping beams and data more intact and provide higher-quality results with less work.
You may also like
