Particle accelerator advances research in physics with help of contributors worldwide

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, was launched Tuesday in Geneva by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) after over a year of repair work.

UCLA is one of multiple universities that work on the $10 billion collider, which, through experiments, is anticipated to reveal information about the nature of the universe.

By colliding two beams of subatomic particles at very high energies, the collider will reconstruct the conditions less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang, allowing physicists to study the smallest known particles in the universe, according to the CERN Web site.

Until recently, issues with magnets that resulted in mechanical damage in September 2008 prevented the collider from running. It took over a year for repairs to be made to ensure that such a problem would not occur again.

On Tuesday, the particle accelerator collided beams at an unprecedented seven trillion electron volts, three and a half trillion electron volts higher than the previous record, to inaugurate the collider’s research program, according to a statement by CERN.

UCLA has been involved with the program since its origin. Physics and astronomy Professor David Cline was one of the founders of the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN, which is one of the four main experiments that comprise the research program.

Moreover, the first meeting of U.S. physicists interested in joining the U.S. contingency of the solenoid detector experiment was organized by UCLA physicists and was held on campus in February 1994.

“UCLA can actually say they were one of the founding institutions,” said physics and astronomy Professor Robert Cousins, who has served as a leader of the CMS experiment and was the highest ranking American at CERN from 2006 to 2009.

The university also played a role in constructing the detector.

Cline, joined by physics and astronomy Professor Katsushi Arisaka, did the final assembly and testing of hundreds of chambers used in the project at the Science and Technology Research Building on campus.

A group of UCLA undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, organized by physics and astronomy Professor Jay Hauser, also built thousands of circuit boards for the project.

Currently, a group of UCLA researchers are working on the detector designed to see the particles and phenomena produced in the high-energy collisions in the collider, by developing, testing and analyzing electronics, Hauser said.

During the 18 to 24 months the collider will run at CERN, the experiments that will be conducted are expected to make significant advances in particle physics.

“We’ll address soon some of the major puzzles of modern physics like the origin of mass, the grand unification of forces and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe,” said Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the CMS experiment, in a statement by CERN.

Finding the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that could resolve inconsistencies in physics theories and explain the origin of mass in the universe, and dark matter are among the discoveries that Cousins is confident the experiments will uncover.

“We could discover a particle in the (collider) that makes up 90 percent of the Milky Way,” he said.

Furthermore, speculations and theories exist about what the collider has the potential to reveal in the future.

“Theorists are running around talking about extra dimensions of space and time. And if that happens that would be the biggest discovery ever, bigger than the Copernican discovery,” Cousins said. “It could happen.”

An extensive UCLA team has worked on the project for over 16 years, providing undergraduate students, like fourth-year physics student Alexx Perloff, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers with the ability to build educational and professional careers. Perloff, who designs and analyzes circuit boards, considers it an honor to be a small part of such a large project.

“The actual real work, which is the fun ““ doing the experiments and analyzing the data, is usually the privilege of the younger people, the postdocs and the graduate students,” Cousins said. “There are quite a few, not just from UCLA, but from eight UC campuses.”

Cousins attributes the work by postdoctoral researchers and graduate students on the project, as well as the university’s contributions to the collider, as reasons why UCLA is a strong institution on the CMS experiment.

“And we get along with people. A lot of what determines how effective you are, in terms of having an impact, is how you get along with the other 2,000 people. All of us, I think, are quite effective with dealing with other cultures,” he said.

While the collider will take months, and even years, before it begins to answer questions about the composition of the universe, the launch of the program is a major step for modern physics.

“It pushes the frontiers of physics in both the physics of the very small, which is the building blocks and forces between them ““ the subject of my work, and the physics of the very large, galaxies and the Big Bang and cosmology,” Cousins said. “And I think that’s why it is so compelling to so many people.”

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