Listen to the sound of particle pings: Scientists turn Large Hadron Collider data into music



Scientists working at the world's biggest particle smasher have turned the masses of data emitting from it into sound for the first time.

More than 40million pieces of data are processed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) every second as it seeks to prove the existence of particles such as the Higgs boson, which researchers believe endows everything in the universe with mass.

Until now the LHC, which lies deep in a 17mile-long beneath the border of France and Switzerland, has produced colourful images as it outputs the data.

This has taken the form of spraying coloured particles in different directions.

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have turned the masses of data emitting from it into sound. This is what they expect data from a Higgs boson, which is believed to endow everything in the universe with mass, to look like

But physicist Dr Lily Asquith, who until recently worked with the LHC at CERN, the European Organisation For Nuclear Research, wanted to be able to hear the particles.

So she used music comparison software to turn data from the collider into sound, thereby giving it another dimension of personality.

'You tend to personify things that you think about a lot,' she told radio station NPR. 'I think electrons, perhaps, sound like a glockenspiel to me.

'It's quite easy... to consider that there could be some kind of sound associated with these things.'

Dr Asquith fed in a sample - three columns of numbers - of the LHC data into the software.

As a beam of particles is shot through the collider, three data points are collected and mapped to sound parameters: the particle travelling away from the internal beam becomes the sound's pitch, the amount of energy a particle is transformed into volume, and the timing of the notes shows how far the particle travels.

Dr Asquith explained: 'So we'll map, for example, the first column of numbers, which may be a distance, to time.

'And we may map the second column of numbers to pitch, and the third, perhaps, to volume.'

While the sounds that emerge might not be described as music, they would certainly appeal to fans of the avante garde.

Dr Asquith admits that the sounds don't tell scientists much at the moment, but she is hopeful they will shine a new light on understanding the data soon.

New data on the origins of the universe is pouring in from the LHC so quickly that physicists may extend the current opening phase of their 'Big Bang' project to the end of 2012.

Breakthrough: The LHC, located beneath the border of France and Switzerland, is creating data at the rate of 40million pieces of information every second

An extension could lead to an early discovery of the elusive Higgs boson believed to have turned an amorphous mass of particles into solid matter at the birth of the cosmos.

The LHC was officially launched to an international fanfare two years ago - but was then forced to shut down less than a fortnight later after a fault.

The particle collider is designed to investigate conditions just after the universe's creation and identify mysterious particles that will fill glaring gaps in our knowledge of physics.

It initially smashed together protons - positively charged particles found in the nuclei of atoms. But in November it began to collide lead ions in an attempt to learn about the 'quark-gluon plasma' that filled the universe just after the Big Bang.

The mini-Big Bangs were created in the 10,000 ton detector inside the tunnel called Alice - A Large Heavy Ion Experiment.

Powerful magnets spun the lead ions around miles of tunnels at near the speed of light. Flying in opposite directions, the particles were focused into a narrow beam and forced to collide inside Alice.

The quark-gluon plasma has been created before at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York by smashing gold ions. However, the New York atom smasher was only able to generate temperatures of 4 million C.

Scientists hope the quark-gluon plasma will allow them to learn more about the 'Strong Force', one of the four fundamental forces of nature.