A team of Syracuse University scientists celebrated with thousands of scientists across
the world as the first beam of protons zoomed at nearly the speed of light around the
17-mile Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva,
Switzerland, around 4 a.m. Syracuse time today. CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics.
An estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries helped design and build the LHC
accelerator and its massive particle detectors, including more than 1,700 scientists,
engineers, students and technicians from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories
supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National
Science Foundation.
SU researchers involved in the project are Sheldon Stone, Marina Artuso, Tomasz
Skwarnicki and Steven Blusk. Stone and Artuso are currently working at CERN and
witnessed the world's most powerful particle accelerator come to life.
Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch, according to the
CERN web site. It's a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the
machine's eight sectors, followed by electrical testing of the 1,600 superconducting
magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are
followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the
eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine.
"As the largest and most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the LHC represents a
monumental technical achievement," says U.S. Department of Energy
Undersecretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach. "I congratulate the world's
scientists and engineers who have made contributions to the construction of the
accelerator for reaching this milestone. We now eagerly await the results that will
emerge from operation of this extraordinary machine."
The first circulating beam is a major accomplishment on the way to the ultimate goal:
high-energy beams colliding in the centers of the LHC's complex particle detectors,
which monitor the results of the collisions. SU researchers have been working on
LHCb, one of four experimental collaborations located in the LHC ring. Their work
has covered several areas. One area includes writing software to monitor the
performance of the so-called "trigger," which must sift through approximately 10
million collisions per second, and select only the 0.02 percent most interesting ones, all
within a minute fraction of a second.
The group has also made key contributions to the most precise position-measuring
device in LHCb, called the VELO, developing specialized tests to gain a better
understanding of how the detector will perform under long-term exposure to the
violent collisions in the LHC. The group has also played an important and leading
role in developing the software infrastructure to align the thousands of independent
detector components.
Once the LHC is fully operational, the SU researchers will join with colleagues across
the world to analyze the data collected by the particle detectors in search of
extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Beyond revealing
a new world of unknown particles, the LHC experiments could explain why those
particles exist and behave as they do. They could reveal the origins of mass, shed light
on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe and possibly find extra
dimensions of space.
"This national and international collaboration of unprecedented scope, and our investment in basic science, fundamental to the NSF mission, provide an exciting opportunity to solve some of the core mysteries of the universe," said Arden L. Bement, Jr., director of the NSF. "With the operation of the LHC, anticipation of transformative scientific discoveries soars to new heights."
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading
laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its
Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India,
Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the
European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
