As particle accelerator closes, UF physicist looks toward new research site

September 28, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia, Ill., will cease operation of its 4.26-mile underground particle accelerator known as the Tevatron on Friday. University of Florida physicist Jacobo Konigsberg has spent much of his career conducting research at the collider and will be there for the final shutdown, but despite the loss of this important instrument, Konigsberg will be looking forward, not back.

“This was a planned progression,” said Konigsberg, a former spokesperson for the Collider Detector at Fermilab, known as the CDF, and a lead researcher. Since the Large Hadron Collider, known as the LHC, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, has come online in recent years, it has become the preferred locale for particle physics research because of the greater number of higher-energy collisions it can produce.

“We made incredible strides at Fermilab,” said Konigsberg, who led the team of 600 physicists credited with discovery of the top quark in 1995. “But we were pushing the collider there very hard to get enough collisions.”

Konigsberg and UF physicist Sergei Klimenko led the effort to build and operate the luminosity detector used to monitor the rate of proton-antiproton collisions at the CDF for the past 11 years. Physicists use the device to identify and observe subatomic particles predicted by the standard model of particle physics.

UF maintains a team of more than 40 physicists that have conducted research at CERN for the past 15 years. They work mostly with the Compact Muon Solenoid, known as the CMS, experiment at the LHC. A UF team built the detector used to identify muons – elementary subatomic particles similar to electrons.

Researchers at CERN, like the researchers at the Tevatron, are searching for the last missing piece that will complete the standard model of physics puzzle – the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.”

“The LHC produces a different mix of collisions with a smaller percentage of them resulting in matter-antimatter reactions than the Tevatron,” said Konigsberg. “But the LHC is more energetic and produces collisions more frequently — approximately 100 million per second.”

“These two effects combined mean that the LHC has tremendous potential to discover the Higgs a lot faster than the Tevatron could have,” he said.

Konigsberg and some of his colleagues campaigned to keep the Tevatron operating for a few more years, but budget constraints dictated that the collider be shut down. Konigsberg will maintain some connection to teams who are still analyzing several years of data from the Tevatron experiments, but most of his efforts will focus on searching for the Higgs boson using data from the LHC at CERN.

“It would be better if both colliders could remain in operation simultaneously,” he said, because seeing the particle under two different scenarios would provide more information about the nature of the particle.

But prospects are excellent for future discoveries at the LHC, according to Konigsberg.

“Essentially, we are just playing with a more powerful microscope,” he said.

Contacts:
Jacobo Konigsberg will be at Fermilab on Friday for the Tevatron shutdown. He is available by phone or email.
Cell: 773-895-1669
Email: Konigsberg@fnal.gov

Sergey Klimenko is available for information regarding the luminosity detector at:
Email: klimenko@phys.ufl.edu

Guenakh Mitselmakher can answer questions about the University of Florida’s continuing research at CERN
Email: Guenakh.Mitselmakher@cern.ch