Spin

THE DIRT ON SPIN

Le Monde just announced that the European Community Large Hadron Collider, on the frontier between France and Switzerland, will come into service this summer although plans for an even bigger machine, at a cost of 5 billion euros, are underway for 2025. And, as physicists like to point out, the research to be carried out has no immediate practical application but is pure research: they are in effect looking for the mysterious Higgs boson, with a spin of 0.

Spin is a property of elementary particles, in effect their magnetic orientation if they have one. An electron has a spin of 1/2 ( h/2pi, h being Planck's constant describing the minute scale). An ordinary proton has a spin of 1. All particles with which we describe matter are fermions and possess spin although not all molecules have it because spin of opposite direction cancels out. Bosons are particles that transmit effect between particles, for example gluons.

In ordinary physics, one cannot keep track of individual particles so that descriptions are statistical.

In chemistry, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance identifies molecules by the magnetic resonance(i.e. amplification) produced when the test matter is put into a known magnetic field.

http://www.cis.rit.edu/htbooks/nmr/preface.htm

The above e-book is a very accessible treatment of spin, although one needs to be quick with math concepts. As for Higgs boson, it would seem to carry the secret to how forces are transmitted between particles. More to come...