UF physicists to observe, interact as huge particle collider amps up

March 26, 2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Physicists from four Florida universities will join colleagues from around the world Tuesday to observe the world’s largest particle accelerator attempt to reach world-record energy levels.

A group of University of Florida physicists is the largest in the state and among the largest in the country participating in the massive Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland. The UF group will observe Tuesday’s events – and interact with colleagues at the collider – via three 52-inch televisions, the Internet and electronic displays in a specially designated “control room” at the UF Physics Building on the Gainesville campus.

“The event on Tuesday marks the launch of a decades-long scientific program at energies far surpassing what has been achieved before,” said Darin Acosta, a UF professor of physics and deputy coordinator of physics for the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, one of two major experiments at the collider.

“We aim to get to the bottom of some fundamental questions such as why matter is made up the way it is, and if there are new forms of matter or even more than three dimensions to the universe,” Acosta said. “We may even be surprised with questions we haven’t even thought of.”

Florida is home to four of 35 sites worldwide, but only eight in the U.S., that will be connected via Internet and video feeds directly to the collider. The other three are at Florida State University, Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University. All are expected to be live Tuesday.

Members of the media are invited to join UF physicists and administrators for the events beginning at about 9 a.m. in the main conference room at the New Physics Building.

At least 30 UF physicists, postdoctoral associates and graduate students have been heavily involved in the collider, a 17-mile-long, $5 billion, underground tunnel equipped with super-cooled magnets. The project was completed in 2008 after 14 years under construction. The majority of the UF scientists are in Gainesville, but UF has at least nine scientists on site at the collider.

Shortly after the collider began operating in 2008, a major breakdown occurred, taking the facility offline until this past November. Officials have been steadily increasing the energy levels in the collider’s beams of protons since then. On Tuesday they will attempt to reach 7 trillion electron volts, a world record and the energy level required for many of the collider’s experiments.

Physicists believe that smashing together protons at such high energies will recreate in miniature the conditions thought to have existed in the first moments of the “Big Bang” more than 13 billion years ago. At least a few of those collisions are expected to result in new, if extremely rare and fleeting, forms of matter. Subsequent analysis could yield clues to the most fundamental mysteries in physics — for example, better understanding of the “dark matter” known to pervade the universe but so far never directly observed.

UF physicists, supported with at least $40 million in federal grant funding, built and tested one of the collider’s critical subsystems, the Muon end cap system.

The system is intended to capture subatomic particles called muons, which are heavier cousins of electrons. Muons are known to be produced during the rapid decay of the particles the collider hopes to identify, especially the Higgs boson. The Higgs, sometimes called the “God particle,” is believed to bestow mass on all other particles.

“If we can get detections of muons cleanly and reliably we have a good shot of identifying these new particles,” said Paul Avery, professor of physics, adding that UF physicists are now part of the team analyzing the collider’s results.