KU News Release

Feb. 26, 2008
Contact: Brendan M. Lynch, University Relations, (785) 864-8855.

KU physicists probe ‘brave new world’ with gargantuan particle accelerator

LAWRENCE — Its magnets are heavier than the Eiffel Tower. It houses the mightiest supercomputer in existence. It creates temperatures hotter than the sun’s heart and more frigid than the deepest realms of the cosmos.

In fact, the largest scientific device ever built looks like it came from the “Close Encounters” movie set. But the Large Hadron Collider is a real instrument that scientists will use to push forward human understanding of the underlying properties of the universe.

Thanks to a five-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation award, students and faculty from the University of Kansas will be on hand when the new particle accelerator begins operation this summer in Europe.

The KU researchers will help to monitor crashes between beams of hadrons — physicists’ jargon for a set of subatomic particles, such as protons — that the supercollider will fire at near-light speed along its 16.5-mile underground track.

The purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to create conditions that existed during the fraction of a nanosecond after the “Big Bang” that created the universe.

“How energy works is what we’re trying to figure out,” said Alice Bean, professor of physics and astronomy at KU. “If you think about the Big Bang theory, there was a lot of energy in the universe and we’ve been cooling ever since.”

According to Bean, research at the supercollider relies on Albert Einstein’s breakthrough formula E=mc², which expresses the idea that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing.

“If you put more energy you can make more mass,” Bean said. “So part of what we’re trying to do is create that energy and then we can create particles with mass. When you collide protons together, you can get that mass together. You can see what happened at that time in the universe.”

Bean is the principal investigator of the NSF’s Partnerships for International Research and Education grant to support two or three KU students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels who will work at the particle accelerator each year.

KU is the lead institution on the award that also funds participation by students from Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska, the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.

Students will live in Switzerland to carry out their research for the supercollider at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen and attend classes at Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. The Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the border between Switzerland and France, is a project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

KU’s involvement with the collider is not new. Bean’s research group worked with more than 2,000 physicists from 35 nations to build a crucial component of the particle accelerator, a detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid. Specifically, the KU team worked to develop the solenoid’s silicon strip detector, which has 10 million electronic readout channels and covers an area over 2,000 square feet.

“If there’s an interesting collision, there are hundreds of particles that come out,” said Bean. “You want to track them. So the way of doing that is using silicon, just like the chips in your computer. Several students from the University of Kansas, including undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, worked to build this detector that’s sitting in there — and the idea is that it will figure out where all these particles went.”

Going forward, students from KU will perform research to upgrade the Compact Muon Solenoid for CERN’s next-generation particle accelerator, dubbed the Super Large Hadron Collider, that is scheduled to come online within a decade.

Indeed, these KU researchers will be poised at the vanguard of physics. Bean says breakthroughs made by smashing hadrons together might someday change life for millions of people, much like the discovery of the electron and development of the Internet.

“This is at the forefront of research where were tying to understand ‘how is matter made?’ and ‘what is mass?’ ” said Bean. “We have particles that have a lot of mass that are very, very tiny. And we don’t understand how that can be so. If we can understand that, maybe we can do stuff like in the old ‘Star Trek.’ You know, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ We can change our mass and put it different places. That’s science fiction right now. But in order to get there, you need to understand how these things work.”

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