A group of University of Colorado at Boulder physics department faculty and students involved in the Large Hadron Collider project are expecting some big surprises following the successful activation of the world's brawniest particle accelerator near Geneva this morning.
暗网禁区 10 CU-Boulder researchers are working on the Large Hadron Collider project, or LHC, which will send protons and charged atoms whizzing around a 17-mile underground loop located on the border of France and Switzerland at 11,000 times per second -- nearly the speed of light. Located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research facility known as CERN, the collider will smash particles together at energy levels seven times higher than the previous record by such accelerators.
The scientists will use the LHC to attempt to recreate conditions immediately following the Big Bang, searching for answers about mysterious dark matter, dark energy, gravity and the fundamental laws of physics. The experiments may even shed light on the possibility that other dimensions exist, according to physicists.
CU-Boulder physics department faculty involved in the project include John Cumalat, Bill Ford, Kevin Stenson, Uriel Nauenberg, Jim Smith and Steve Wagner, as well as several postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. Wagner, postdoctoral researcher Mauro Dinardo and graduate students Bernadette Heyburn and Kevin Givens are at the CERN site for the tests this week, said Cumalat.
Fifteen years in the making, the $3.8 billion LHC project involves an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 94 American universities and laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. The United States is providing about $530 million, primarily for the LHC detectors.
"This is a very exciting project, because we are on the frontier of energy," said Cumalat. "We are expecting some very big surprises in the coming months and years."
The CU-Boulder researchers have been working on the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of two massive particle detectors in the collider and which weighs more than 12,500 tons. The amount of steel used in the magnetic yoke of the CMS is equivalent to the amount steel used to build the Eifel Tower, Cumalat said.
The CU-Boulder team has been working with the CMS "forward pixel detectors," which Cumalat called "the eyes of the device." The forward pixel detectors will help researchers measure the direction and momentum of subatomic particles following collisions as they penetrate roughly 25 million different silicon elements, providing clues to their origin and physical structure, he said.
One target of scientists is to find evidence of the "Higgs boson," a theoretical elementary particle that has been predicted by physicists and which is believed to hold clues to the mass of matter. Confirmations of the Higgs boson would complete the so-called standard model of the known particles, said Cumalat.
A single second of data acquisition by CMS will be equal to the data volume of 10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica sets, said Cumalat. "We view CMS as our Rosetta Stone for understanding subatomic particles," he said.
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