CU physicists help global army of scientists in search for clues to elusive mysteries of universe
Installation of the CMS silicon tracking detector was successfully completed in December 2007. (courtesy of CERN)
University of Colorado at Boulder physics faculty and students involved in the Large Hadron Collider project expect some big surprises following the activation of the world's brawniest particle accelerator near Geneva in September.
About 10 CU-Boulder researchers work on the Large Hadron Collider project, or LHC, which will shoot protons and charged atoms around a 17-mile underground loop 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, physicists say.
CU-Boulder physics department faculty involved in the project include John Cumalat, Bill Ford, 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 were at the CERN site for the tests in September.
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.
"This is a very exciting project, because we are on the frontier of energy," said Cumalat.
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 that of the Eiffel Tower, Cumalat said.
– CU News Services