Collision course

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is more than 5,000 miles away, but when particles fly in late 2009, UTD physicists will be on the job.

Nearly 17 miles long, the LHC is the world's largest particle accelerator. It uses superconducting magnets to create high-energy ion collisions similar to those during the big bang.

The European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the 2009 LHC experiment schedule in February. CERN scientists hope data will reveal more about the early stages of the universe and how mass and gravity work, UTD physics professor Joseph Izen said.

UTD started working with LHC scientists in 2005. Izen and UTD physics department head Xinchou Lou approached the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) experiment, which works with one of six detectors in the LHC.

"We started doing service work on the collider as a token of our good intentions," Izen said.

After helping in the last stages of the LHC's construction, UTD became an official ATLAS collaborator in 2008.

Izen said UTD was accepted more than a year before most other universities because scientists at ATLAS were impressed with the UTD team's dedication. Even senior faculty crawled around inside the collider maze, plugging in and testing cables.

When the LHC starts producing data in late 2009, UTD physicists will collect and analyze data, largely from ATLAS's 80 megapixel detector.

Getting conclusive evidence about the Higgs boson, a key component of the standard model of particle physics, is one of the main goals for the collider, Izen said. It is a theoretical particle that has never been observed. Dark matter, an essential part of current theories about gravity and mass, has also never been directly observed. The LHC has the potential to provide new information about both.

"There are some who try to detect dark matter directly, but a lot of us think that the best chance of figuring out what it is is to just make the darn stuff," Izen said.

The LHC in Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in the world, but in the early 90s it would have been the slower, smaller sibling of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas. The U.S. House of Representatives didn't renew funding in 1993 and the SSC project was scrapped after $2 billion and six years.

"The past decade has not been kind to particle physics in the United States," Izen said.

A September 2008 accident caused by imperfect soldering shut the collider down for months. One by one, other major particle accelerators are closing down major experiments due to lack of funding. The LHC is now the main hope for pushing the boundaries of human understanding forward.

"The LHC is different from existing detectors," said physics doctoral student Masayuki Kondo. "There are a lot of potential discoveries that we could only make with the LHC."

Izen, along with many other scientists, is hopeful about the experiment. But he said concrete results will take time.

"We're not going to turn on and discover the Higgs (boson) or supersymmetry the next day, it will take years of accumulating data," Izen said.