The world’s biggest and most expensive scientific experiment – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets underway at CERN in Geneva on September 10. Scientists hope that by smashing particles together at near the speed of light, the LHC will provide critical insight into origins of the universe including the mysterious ‘dark matter’ that occupies much of space. Some people fear the machine will instead create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.
Beams of protons will be fired around the LHC and will be made to collide at four different locations, corresponding to the positions of different particle detectors. There are 6 detectors in total but the two largest general-purpose detectors, named ATLAS and CMS, will have the main task of analysing the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator.
The University of Sydney and University of Melbourne scientists have contributed to the development of the ATLAS detector in the LHC. Australia has invested approximately $2.5 million in the project which is a collaboration of over 40 participating countries.
The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC took place at 5:30pm AEST on 10 September 2008.
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Professor Geoffrey Taylor is from the School of Physics at The University of Melbourne. He is leading the University of Melbourne team involved in the LHC.
Dr Bruce Yabsley is a particle physicist from the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney.
Dr Aldo Saavedra is a Research Fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is working on the ATLAS experiment within the LHC.
Dr Cathy Foley is President of the Australian Institute of Physics.
Dr Elisabetta Barberio is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.
Dr Roger Rassool is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne
Dr Phil Dooley, Science Communicator at the School of Physics, University of Sydney
Anthony Waugh is a PhD student in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia
Dr Kevin Varvell and Dr Bruce Yabsley are from the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Sydney:
Professor Geoffrey Taylor is from the School of Physics at The University of Melbourne. He is leading the University of Melbourne team involved in the LHC.
“After two decades of development, design, test, and more development, physicists from the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney are eagerly awaiting the start-up of the LHC. With the need to produce particle detectors capable of withstanding the thousand times higher particle intensities of the LHC, and with electronics capable of performing in such an environment, the challenge was enormous. As with all aspects of the ATLAS detector (one of the two major experiments installed in the LHC), collaboration was the key.
The Australians worked alongside colleagues from Europe, Russia, Japan and the USA on the precision silicon tracker detector, now placed at the heart of ATLAS. The Australian team also had important Australian industrial support.
Perth company VEEM engineering produced 35 tons of machined copper alloy disks to shield sensitive parts of the ATLAS detector from the intense particle beams. Startronics (Victoria) produced custom electronics to feed the power needs of the silicon tracker.
The Australians are now looking forward to the start of what is expected to be the dawn of a new era in fundamental physics. Massive computer capability is at the ready, both locally and internationally, via the Grid, for the physicists to make sense of the data that ATLAS will soon produce. What they will find is still unknown. What is known is that major gaps in our knowledge of the universe will be filled by this incredible endeavour.”
Dr Bruce Yabsley is a particle physicist from the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney.
On the disaster scenarios:
“Because the LHC is new, and the highest-energy collider we’ve ever built, some people have raised safety concerns about it. But in fact the proton-beam collisions in ATLAS and the other detectors are at low energies in the wider scheme of things. Cosmic rays hitting earth’s atmosphere, or the moon, can reach much higher energies; and even those energies are dwarfed by cosmic rays collisions in space. And all of these things have been going on for billions of years. We can’t compete with nature on energy, and we’re not trying to: the point of the LHC is to access some of these interactions in the lab — inside these big and precisely instrumented detectors — where we can study them properly.”
Dr Aldo Saavedra is a Research Fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is working on the ATLAS experiment within the LHC.
On Australian involvement in the early years:
“There was a large R&D effort directed at creating the components of the ATLAS detector in the early stages of the experiment. Australia, through Sydney and Melbourne University, was involved testing and developing the units that measure the position of charged particles as they travel through it, called strip detectors. Hundreds of them are mounted in layers around the collision to recreate the path of the charged particles created”.
On the current contribution:
“Now that the detector is built the focus has been contributing to the software that analyses the data from ATLAS.
It has been said that if all the data from ATLAS was recorded, it would fill 100,000 CDs per second. In reality this is cut down to 27 CDs-worth per minute to keep it reasonable by the ATLAS trigger. One of our current projects is to decrease the amount of data saved by increasing the efficiency of capturing the interesting information. The information that may contain a new discovery.
There are lots of ways to trigger the detector to save the data. In Sydney our interest is triggering with the tau lepton which is a heavy cousin of the electron, being heavy has two advantages: It produces a striking signature in the detector and the particles we want to discover should decay into them.”
On what it means for Australian students:
“There are lots of scope for students to make their mark in the experiment. They get the chance to work with scientists in the experiment at CERN and meet students from all over the world. Here in Sydney Jason Lee and Anthony Waugh work on reconstructing and identifying the different particles that were recorded by ATLAS and finding ways to more efficiently model the detector in order to understand how it will respond.”
On how it feels:
“It is an exciting time because this new accelerator is providing us a window to a new regime of matter never studied before. It is uncharted territory and after a lot of work finally the voyage is about to begin. We live in interesting times, it is not every day that you are able to be involved on something new and have the chance to peek at Mother Nature’s book.”
Dr Cathy Foley is President of the Australian Institute of Physics.
“Australian physicists have been involved from the beginning, a team lead by Geoff Taylor from the University of Melbourne and Kevin Varvell from the University of Sydney have contributed to ATLAS – one of six machines at the LHC that will attempt to detect the strange particles created. They have designed detectors and shielding, developed software to model the behaviour of the detector, and software that triggers the collection of information.
The discoveries that will be made at the LHC will rewrite our understanding of how the universe began and the way it operates at the most fundamental level.
Scientists think the kinds of collisions that the LHC will be generating happen all the time in nature. Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, it’s like a rice-bubble pop.”
Dr Elisabetta Barberio is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.
“It is important that students engage in the science of such blue-sky research – we need physicists to make sense of all the data the LHC will generate! The output of the LHC experiment is considerable – equivalent to 100,000 DVDs of data will be produced each year. We have to think of new ways of being able to store and access, and analyse the secrets held within the data, which means developing new technologies like grid computing.”
Dr Roger Rassool is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne
“This is a really special time in the physics community – for this generation of students, it is the 1960s equivalent of man’s moon walk. For students, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event and will inspire a generation for years to come. These experiments go to the heart of really big questions like ‘what is the universe really made of?’ and ‘why do we exist?’. It’s exciting stuff!”
Dr Phil Dooley, Science Communicator at the School of Physics, University of Sydney
“No, the world won’t end as LHC turns on. Instead a new world of discoveries will open up as we explore further and further into inner space. The things we are trying to see are way smaller than any microscope can see, instead we play a grown-up version of smash-up derby, winding protons (sub-atomic particles that we are all made of) up to extraordinary speeds and smashing them together to see what happens. This is a realm made possible by the Theory of Relativity and E=MC2; Einstein would be proud of us.
The energies the LHC will be able to create are greater than any experiment we’ve ever done before – closer to the big bang than we’ve ever witnessed. However the particles are very small, so it’s not really a big bang – more a nano-bang – an incredible amount of energy but in a tiny tiny area. So even in the extremely unlikely event that a black hole is created it would be so small that it would be almost impossible to detect, and not at all dangerous!
But there will be particles that have never before been seen, which will revolutionise our understanding of the universe – and what we are made of. There is no doubt that twenty years hence this will have been one of the most significant experiments ever and it’s great that Australian physicists, from The University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne are a key part of this quest.
Even before any data has come out, the experiment has already been a revolution in its creation; coordinating a team of thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians from 80 countries working on the one project, in the process creating the world’s largest fridge, and getting it colder than deep space; and creating a network of supercomputers able to digest the vast amounts of data that this experiment will spit out are already triumphs and a tribute to the extraordinary resources of our human race.”
Anthony Waugh is a PhD student in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia
On what it means for a student to work on ATLAS:
“The ATLAS experiment on the LHC is a great project to work on. The opportunity to collaborate with some of the leading physicists in the world, on the largest experiment in the world is very exciting. The biggest thing is knowing that although the Australian group is small in numbers, our contribution has been and will continue to be, extremely important and genuinely valued by the ATLAS community.”
Dr Kevin Varvell and Dr Bruce Yabsley are from the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Sydney:
“‘The ‘point’ of the Large Hadron Collider is to find out new things about matter at the smallest scale: the fundamental ‘building blocks’, and how they interact with each other. Current theory explains this very well indeed, at the energies we can reach in existing particle accelerators.
But at LHC energies we expect to see something new. The simplest new thing would be a particle called the Higgs boson, which is the one part of our current theory we haven’t seen yet. However other alternatives are possible. We may see a bunch of particles like the Higgs, but with different behaviour; if the theoretical model called ‘supersymmetry’ is correct, we’ll see lots of new types of particles, maybe including the still-unknown ‘dark matter’ that contributes 85% of the stuff in galaxies.
If some recent suggestions about gravity are true, we may even see miniature black holes: tiny tiny ones, smaller than a proton and evaporating in an instant. But at the moment all of this is speculation.
Once we’ve sorted through the data from the LHC and understood it, we’ll know which of these ideas correspond to reality, and which don’t. The correct answers may be things we haven’t thought of yet … it’s a very exciting time to be working in particle physics.”
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