Skip to footer

What does the Higgs boson sound like? Atom-smasher data set to music.

Researchers with CERN's ATLAS experiment, which helped discover what is thought to be the elusive Higgs boson, have taken their data and turned it into a piano score.

|
Domenico Vicinanza
Researchers transformed data collected by the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment into musical notes, with music about 3.5 seconds into the score representing data for the possible Higgs boson particle.

Atom-smashing physicists have just turned data for a newly discovered particle, likely the Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other particles their mass, into music.

What does the possible Higgs boson sound like? The music created from the particle's data is beautiful, with one version having a marimba feel. And now, you can listen for yourself.

On July 4, researchers at the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in Switzerland, announced they had seen a particle weighing roughly 125 to 126 times the mass of the proton that was consistent with the Higgs boson. The evidence came from two experiments at LHC, called ATLAS and CMS.

The researchers used so-called data sonification to transform data collected by the ATLAS experiment (one of the two experiments, CMS is the other, that found evidence for the likely Higgs particle) into sound. Essentially, they used a graph showing the ATLAS data and turned the energies of collisions shown on that graph into musical notes. Each data point, or energy number for a collision, was always given the same musical note, with the melody changes following exactly the same profile (the ups and downs) of the scientific data.

"It offers the same qualitative and quantitative information contained in the graph, only translated into notes," composer, physicist and engineer Domenico Vicinanza told LiveScience. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

Vicinanza and colleagues created two versions of the "Higgs score," one a piano solo and the other a piano with added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone. The spike in data around 126 gigaelectron volts (where one GeV is about the mass of a proton), the telltale sign of Higgs, can be heard about 3.5 seconds into these recordings.

The beats are not just music to the ears, as Vicinanza said the melody could be useful for many reasons. "For example, it would allow a blind researcher to understand exactly where the Higgs boson peak is and how big the evidence is," Vicinanza said. "At the same time, it could give a musician the opportunity to explore the fascinating world of the high-energy physics by playing its wonders," added Vicinanza, who is a network engineer at DANTE, which is part of the high-speed pan-European research and education network called GÉANT.

Also, Vicinanza added, using different algorithms for turning data into sound, researchers may be able to detect interesting phenomena just by listening to their data.

Vicinanza and two collaborators, Mariapaola Sorrentino and Giuseppe La Rocca, relied on GÉANT to convert the data into sound.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to What does the Higgs boson sound like? Atom-smasher data set to music.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0711/What-does-the-Higgs-boson-sound-like-Atom-smasher-data-set-to-music
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe