The world’s largest particle accelerator made history Tuesday when two beams of energy collided with one another at levels never before seen by scientists — and a team of MSU researchers had a front row seat as it happened.
Members of the group — composed of researchers, professors and graduate students — sat watching large screens in the Large Hadron Collider’s control room while two beams containing 20 billion protons each raced toward one another at several miles per hour less than the speed of light.
Located near Geneva at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the collider is 16 years in the making and has cost $10 billion. Its goal is to create conditions similar to those immediately following the Big Bang.
Tuesday’s collision marked the second time the LHC’s operators were able to make the two beams meet, said Raymond Brock, MSU professor of physics and astronomy.
Brock, who currently is at CERN, said although the collision did not last long enough to create the “new physics,” researchers expect the collider to eventually produce, it marked new ground for both MSU and the scientific community.
He is a member of the MSU group that works on ATLAS, a 7,700-ton detector that collects data from the collisions to be sorted through and transmitted to various universities and institutions across the globe.
“(The Hadron collider) is the next step in this field,” Brock said. “Michigan State’s been involved for 10 (years), and we’re looking forward to literally two decades of rewriting textbooks.”
The accelerator’s first collisions were supposed to occur in fall 2008. When it first was turned on, splices between magnets shorted, causing a liquid helium leak that sent a shockwave through the collider’s tunnels, damaging about 25 percent of its equipment.
Brock said although operators began attempting to collide the energy beams in the early morning hours, it took until 1 p.m. local time Tuesday to bring them together because sensors installed after the 2008 malfunction kept detecting mechanical hums and shutting the collider down.
Each individual beam contained more energy than the combined beams at the collider’s sister accelerator, the Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. Brock said in spite of this, it will take up to two years for any “new physics” to be discovered because of the sheer magnitude of collecting and analyzing data.
Jenny Lyn Holzbauer, an MSU graduate student and member of the ATLAS team, said her education stands to gain because the Hadron collider now is producing proper collisions.
“I can now study actual collisions rather than examining simulations,” Holzbauer said. “It allows me to help advance the knowledge within my field by giving me a chance to actually examine data and learn new things about some very small, but fundamental, particles.”
Given the size of MSU’s CERN contingency and its investment throughout the years, the successful collision is another triumph that is sure to be followed by many more, said Bernard Pope, MSU professor of physics and astronomy and ATLAS member. About 20 collaborators work on MSU’s ATLAS team.
“It’s been a long time in building and planning and it’s finally here,” Pope said. “And we’re very excited.”
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