Here's what a 'God Particle' sounds like

The recently-discovered fundamental particle that scientists believe may be the elusive Higgs Boson or so-called "God particle" appears to have a heavenly sound, after researchers converted the experimental data describing its existence into musical notes.

 

One version of the new particle's sound —based on data collected by the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment— even has "a marimba feel," according to a report on LiveScience.com.  

 

"It offers the same qualitative and quantitative information contained in the graph, only translated into notes," composer, physicist and engineer Domenico Vicinanza told LiveScience.

 

Last July 4, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland announced they had seen a particle weighing 125 to 126 times the mass of the proton that was consistent with the Higgs boson.

Transcribing the music  

The researchers used so-called data sonification to transform data collected by the ATLAS experiment 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," LiveScience said.

 

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 (one GeV is about the mass of a proton), the telltale sign of Higgs, can be heard about 3.5 seconds into these recordings. Practical uses

 

Vicinanza said the beats are not just music to the ears, since 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. 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," said Vicinanza, a network engineer at DANTE, which is part of the high-speed pan-European research and education network called GEANT.

 

Also, Vicinanza said using different algorithms for turning data into sound can help researchers detect interesting phenomena just by listening to their data.

 

Vicinanza and two collaborators, Mariapaola Sorrentino and Giuseppe La Rocca, relied on GEANT to convert the data into sound. — TJD, GMA News