Officials Give Nod To UF Particle Accelerator Project

October 12, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A two-day review of University of Florida physicists’ work on one of the largest scientific collaborations in history has left federal officials pleased with the researchers’ progress.

The UF department of physics heads up a $40 million project to build detectors for the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator under construction in Switzerland — expected to be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator when completed in 2005.

A delegation officials from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, which are funding the research, arrived at UF’s new physics building on Tuesday for a two-day review of UF’s efforts and to examine the equipment — designed to detect tiny particles called muons. Although production will not start until next year, UF physicists and their collaborators at other institutions have built and are testing several 12-foot-long aluminum and copper detector prototypes outfitted with an array of electronics.

“The reason we scheduled the visit at this time is because we know UF is ready for production,” said Jim Yeck, the DOE/NSF-appointed project manager. “UF’s progress has been very good.”

The Large Hadron Collider, located near Geneva at the giant European atom-smasher center CERN, is expected to bring protons and ions into head-on collisions at higher energies than ever achieved. This will allow scientists to recreate the conditions of the universe just after the “Big Bang,” shedding light on the universe’s origins and fundamental structure of matter.

The United States is slating about $540 million for research contributing to the international effort. UF’s role is to lead a team of physicists from 12 universities, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and groups from China and Russia in the detector production.

When completed, the accelerator will collide high energy particles in a 16-mile underground tunnel. The detectors will be placed around the point of collision in a device called the Compact Muon Solenoid — something of a misnomer, since the solenoid will be five stories tall and weigh 14,500 tons when completed. The muons are expected to be produced during the decay of new particles discovered at the accelerator.

The Fermi lab near Chicago will partially piece together 144 detectors. The lab will ship half of the unfinished detectors to UF and half to the University of California at Los Angeles. UF and UCLA physicists will complete the assembly and test the detectors using cosmic rays, which also contain muons. Once installed, the detectors will cover the area of a football field, yet be accurate to within 1/10th of a millimeter.

“Through leading the design and production of these muon detectors, UF is playing a major role in the construction of the particle accelerator,” said Guenakh Mitselmakher, a UF professor of physics and the project leader.