• Question: What is the project-"UFOs at the LHC"?

    Asked by jaffacakes to Nick, Francesca on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by g30rg1n4, , lovetodance333.
    • Photo: Francesca Day

      Francesca Day answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Well noticed! I wasn’t studying real UFOs of course (I’m pretty sure they don’t exist!). In my research, UFO stands for “Unidentified Falling Object”. (Yes, particle physicists like bad jokes!) I was working at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a big machine built to collide particles together really fast. When I was there, they were having problems with very small bits of dust falling into the particle beams. We called these bits of dust UFOs!

      I was helping to figure out exactly what the “UFOs” were. It was lots of fun, particularly working with so many other particle physicists. 🙂

    • Photo: Nick Wright

      Nick Wright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      I don’t think I’ve ever seen a UFO – perhaps I should visit the LHC to spot one!

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