Collider’s first test a smashing success

Data collected will help to explain how the universe works

By Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service – March 31, 2010, p. B3

Isabel Trigger and her husband Rob McPherson were a bit sleep-deprived after the much anticipated and oft delayed collision in the tunnel under the Swiss-French border Tuesday.

But the physics power couple, key players on the Canadian team involved with the unprecedented international experiment, are ecstatic to see the Large Hadron Collider finally smashing subatomic particles.

“It really is fantastic,” Trigger said from the TRIUMF national physics laboratory at the University of B.C. after Tuesday’s collision in Europe.

The protons collided 100 metres underground just after 1 p.m. Central European time.

Whoops and cheers filled the crowded control room at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva and were echoed by physicists from Tokyo to Toronto.

“This is the breakthrough movement we have all been waiting for,” says McPherson, a professor at University of Victoria and principal investor of the Canadian team that helped design, build and commission the most complicated machine ever.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to collide proton beams at energies not seen since the milliseconds after the Big Bang—prompting some to dub it the Big Bang: The Sequel.

The scientists were marvelling Tuesday over the quality and volume of the data from the “events” generated as the machine finally went live.

“The amazing thing is not that they got them to collide,” says Trigger, “but that since then we’ve had in the order of a million events in ATLAS.”

ATLAS is one of the cathedral-sized detectors inside the collider that runs in a circular 27-kilometre long circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border. Scientists have spent almost 20 years designing and building the collider that ran into serious problems when it was first fired up in 2008, resulting in an explosion. They are taking it slower this time and will run the collider at half power for the next year and half.

The detectors will record everything that happens when proton beams collide. There is so much data that it is being been sent to a network of “computing farms” around the world, including one humming away at a processing centre at TRIUMF, which is tucked in the woods on the edge of the UBC campus.

Nigel Lockyer, TRIUMF’s director, says it is all pretty remarkable.

“The protons beams collide in Geneva, they go through this incredible detector with millions of sensors, then the electronic signals are transferred to computers that end up sending light signals across the Atlantic and across Canada all the way to TRIUMF,” he says. “And then, if somebody in Japan wants to access data, they have to cross the Pacific to get to Canada.”

Canada’s contribution to the project has cost close to $100 million over the last 15 years, which Lockyer describes as “an absolute steal for Canada.”

About 200 people are currently involved, including 100 graduate students who will be among the first to “study matter at this new energy frontier,” says McPherson.

Researchers are hoping for new understanding of how the universe works. They hope to discover new forces, new dimensions, and perhaps even find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that may be responsible for mass.

“With a little luck, nature will be kind to us,” says Trigger, group leader of the ATLAS team at TRIUMF. She likens the task to looking for needles in a haystack because there will be so much data to sift through.