卑鄙者的墓志铭

Dark secrets
Nov 19th 2008
From The World in 2009 print edition
By Geoffrey Carr

译自The Economist
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12494714&d=2009

The physics discovery of 2009 may come from Yorkshire
2009年度物理发现可能会来自约克郡

It was supposed to be the year that saw the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, which physicists need to explain why matter has mass. The Higgs, as many readers will be aware, is the principal quarry of a billion particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider that is located on the outskirts of Geneva. However the LHC, which was commissioned to great acclaim in September 2008, closed down in a rather embarrassing puff of helium gas from its cooling system nine days later. The repairs will take so long that the likelihood of its finding anything dramatic before the end of 2009 is now remote.

在这一年，希格斯波色子原本将有可能被发现。这是一种人们长久以来一直在寻找的粒子，它将有助于物理学家来解 释质量的成因。正如许多读者所知，日内瓦郊外已建成一座耗资100亿美元的粒子加速器，称作大型强子对撞机(LHC)，其主要目的便是对希格斯波色子进行 研究。LHC于2008年9月建成，引来了一片欢呼。然而，运行九天之后，却不得不在其冷却系统的氦泄漏声中尴尬地关闭。这次维修将耗费相当长的时间，所 以，2009年年底之前，能得到重大发现的希望已变得极为渺茫。


That gives a rather less flashy project the chance of making the physics discovery of the year. The Boulby Underground Laboratory is stuck at the bottom of a potash mine in northern England. The aim of its three experiments, known as Zeplin-II, Zeplin-III and Drift-II, is to detect dark matter—for another of the things that physicists don’t know is why the visible sort of matter that stars, planets and people are made of seems to be only a sixth of the total.

这就把“年度物理发现”的机会让给了另外一个低调得多的项目。博尔比地下实验室坐落于英国北部一座盐钾碱矿底 部，它将进行三个实验项目，分别为Zeplin-II、Zeplin-III 和 Drift-II，其目的是对暗物质进行探测。“暗物质”的猜测来源于物理学家的另外一个疑惑：我们可见的各种物质，即组成诸如恒星、行星或是人类的物 质，仅占整个宇宙物质的6%。


The best guess is that dark matter is made of different types of particle from “ordinary” matter. The LHC has a good chance of making these particles, but if they are six times as common as ordinary matter in outer space then it ought to be possible to detect them in the wild, as it were. That is what Boulby is trying to do. Unfortunately, they are hard to detect.

最可能的假设便是暗物质是由与“普通物质”截然不同的微粒所组成的。LHC很有可能会制造出这些微粒，但既然太空中的暗物质是普通物质的六倍之多，那么在其自然状态下，我们也应该可以观测到它们。这就是博尔比实验室正在尝试的工作。不过遗憾的是，观测它们相当困难。


The Zeplin detectors are filled with liquid xenon. The hope is that occasional dark-matter particles called neutralinos will run into the nuclei of the xenon atoms, releasing detectable amounts of energy as they do so. Drift-II is more ambitious. If it works, it will be able to track such a recoiling nucleus through a device filled with gas. It will therefore be possible to work out which direction the neutralino that caused it to recoil came from and thus engage in a form of dark-matter astronomy.

Zeplin探测器中充满液态氙。科学家们希望，在被称作中轻微子的暗物质粒子遇到氙原子的原子核时，能释放出可观测到的能量。而Drift-II的目标更加远大，如果可能，它可以在充满某种气体的装置中跟踪碰撞后的原子核。由此就可以计算出发生碰撞的中轻微子的来向，甚至产生一门暗物质天文学。


And if Boulby does come up trumps, then it will be a delightful victory for cheap and cheerful science over the billion-dollar variety.

如果博尔比实验室真的成功，那么，相对于耗费巨资的科学研究而言，这将是“物美价廉”型科学研究的一场辉煌胜利。