Physicists help complete the world’s most powerful particle accelerator

Faculty and students in the Physics Department are part of an international team of scientists celebrating completion of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operation this summer, is a 27-kilometer ring buried deep beneath the outskirts of Geneva, where billions of protons will travel close to the speed of light and generate up to one billion collisions per second. As they collide at extremely high energy, the protons will briefly generate a host of exotic particles, whose existence and movements will be recorded by four detectors built into the ring.

The Large Hadron Collider is expected to produce a new world of unknown particles that make up matter and explain why these particles exist and behave in certain ways. Collected data could explain why matter has mass, reveal the mysteries of dark matter and uncover extra dimensions in space.

“We have high hopes that the data will answer a number of long-standing questions in our current understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, in particular why certain particles have mass and how mass is acquired,” says associate professor Stephane Willocq. “Also, the current theory of particle physics, dubbed the Standard Model, requires the existence of yet undiscovered particles in order to be internally consistent. The LHC will create proton-proton collisions at energies sufficiently large to produce these new particles.”

UMass is part of the ATLAS project, an experiment that will use one of the four detectors built into the LHC. The UMass ATLAS group joined the project in 2004 and now consists of faculty members Willocq and Carlo Dallapiccola and three scientists based at CERN. Three graduate students are also on the team.

Willocq is the overall software coordinator and a member of the steering group for the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer, a device that will identify and measure the paths of a particle known as the muon in a magnetic field, which allows their movements to be determined with high precision.

“We are leading several areas, including event data modeling, reconstruction and data quality,” says Willocq. “Initial work will focus on commissioning the detector and testing the performance of the algorithm that reconstructs the muons produced in the collisions.”

Willocq will use data from the ATLAS experiment to search for a particle called the heavy Z boson. Dallapiccola will search for miniature black holes that may be produced by the collider.

Graduate students German Colon, Andrew Meade and Emily Thompson will use data collected by ATLAS to search for yet undiscovered phenomena at the extremely high energies to be delivered by the accelerator. They will spend part of their time at CERN and later earn doctoral degrees based on their research.


Photo: CERN-Atlas Experiment

March 6, 2008.

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