While other students and faculty may be going to class or grading homework, a group of researchers from the University of Kansas are busy trying to discover the secrets of the universe.
Lead by Alice Bean, professor of physics, and Michael Murray, associate professor, a team of undergraduate and graduate students are working on the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, situated on the border between France and Switzerland.
"We're looking at the fundamental nature of existence: how things work, why we're here. And this is going to be the tool," Bean said.
Not only did the team assist in the operation of the collider, they helped to build it.
Particle accelerators collide two beams of protons, basic building
blocks of the atom, in an attempt to discover the basic physics behind
those collisions. The KU group is split between the experimental
particle physics side, headed by Bean, and the nuclear physics group,
lead by Murray. Both helped in the construction of the CMS, or Compact
Muon Solenoid, one of the six detectors at the LHC.
The detector is an immense, barrel-shaped piece of equipment consisting of several different "trackers" built of silicon, all ringed by an enormous magnet roughly 20 feet wide. Collisions of protons take place inside the detector, where the silicon trackers determine where the particles go after they collide.
"Basically, it's giant pieces of silicon put underground to try to detect new particles, or try to understand particles and how they behave," said Chris Martin, Manhattan junior. Martin is currently in Switzerland working on the project.
Martin is just one of a number of KU students and researchers who have worked with CMS and the Large Hadron Collider.
Since 2001, 10 undergraduate students, two graduate students, and six post-doctoral researchers from the University have assisted in the construction and operation of the silicon tracking system for CMS. While much of the work was done in KU labs writing software for CMS, a grant, called the National Science Foundation's Program in International Research and Education, allowed students like Martin to travel to Switzerland and work with the project directly.
While both groups from the University use the same equipment, they're each looking to answer very different questions about how the universe's fundamental laws operate.
Murray's nuclear physics group is using the detector to examine the mechanics of the collisions of particles, both to assess how well the collider is working and to try to recreate conditions very similar to those thought present at the beginning of the universe.
"We want to know the geometry of the collision, whether it's head-on, or these are glancing collisions," Murray said. "We're trying to turn back the clock on the universe, so we collide the biggest particles we can find in an attempt to create lots of little Big Bangs."
Bean's experimental particle physics group is searching for the particles that may make up the majority of matter in the universe.
The particles we know about already are less than 5 percent of the makeup of the universe. The other 95 percent may be theoretical particles like dark matter, called heavy stable charged particles. Bean's group works with the CMS detector searching for these particles. Their existence may be crucial in supporting a theory called supersymmetry, which states that for every particle we know of, there exists a supersymmetric partner, a double of that particle.
"We've reached a point where we're going to see stuff we've predicted for half a century, or we won't see it at all, which means we've been totally wrong," said Jennifer Sibille. "I think it's a really exciting time." Sibille, Lafayette, La., graduate student, worked with both the nuclear and particle physics groups.
Aside from new knowledge about how the world works, the project may have more immediate implications.
The technology developed for use in things like the LHC and the CMS detector will spill over into the private sector and lead to faster Internet and more efficient data processing systems.
Source: Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory, European Organization for Nuclear Research
"We're gaining knowledge about electronic systems and conductors, so we can use that to improve things like cell phones and PDA's," Martin said.
For teachers like Bean, the gains from this project are somewhat less tangible.
"Most exciting things for me is that we're training students...to be the innovators of the next generation," Bean said.
Sibille is one of those students trained by this undertaking. She spent one summer working with the nuclear team and spent this past summer installing and testing sensors for the CMS detector.
"I think it's very exciting, partly just because it's one of those
places in the world where you know the best people in the field are
eating lunch at a table across the room," Sibille said.
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