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Back to the Big Bang

23 September 2008

One of the first images from CMS showing the debris of particles picked up in the detector's calorimeters and muon chambers.

An image from CMS showing the debris of particles picked up in the calorimeters and muon chambers.

By Jay Mayfield

Students and researchers from the UT Knoxville physics department are working on a project hailed as the largest scientific endeavor in the world—one that could potentially change our understanding of how the universe was created.

UT Knoxville physics Professor Stefan Spanier and a group of postdoctoral researchers and students are working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a machine so large that it spans the border of France and Switzerland. The LHC is designed to accelerate protons—fundamental atomic building blocks—to nearly the speed of light, and cause them to collide.

Those collisions will allow researchers to closely recreate the conditions that existed during the Big Bang, and in doing so, get a glimpse of the process that led to the creation of all matter.

“There have been so many theories and ideas generated about what happened at the time of the Big Bang,” says Spanier. “But after all that, we still really know only a small amount. The experiment is expected to make groundbreaking discoveries.”

Accelerating the protons to such a staggering speed takes energy, power, and space. The LHC main tunnel, buried more than 300 feet below the surface of the Earth, is nearly 17 miles long. How powerful is the beam of protons itself? In one second, it can dump enough energy into a single spot to power 4 million light bulbs.

Spanier and his team work on an instrument at the LHC called the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The CMS will capture and measure the tiny fragments that fly out of these powerful collisions between protons. He and his team look specifically at how to protect the massive but fragile instrument from the beam’s radiation.

Physics graduate student Matt Hollingsworth helps install radiation detectors near the beam pipe of the LHC.

Matt Hollingsworth, an alumnus of UT Knoxville’s undergraduate program in physics who came back to pursue his Ph.D., notes the broad scope of the collaboration behind the LHC project.

“It’s empowering to know that many people can come together and make something like this happen, that one person couldn’t ever do it alone,” he says.

On top of contributing to hands-on work in Europe, UT Knoxville is also a computational hub for the work of the LHC, which generates nearly unprecedented amounts of data for physicists to analyze. It requires a global computing grid, and thanks to the campus’s history of high-speed computing and a powerful existing link to Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, UT Knoxville is home to a node on the global LHC grid.

That means that part of the shared load of processing data from the LHC will end up in Knoxville, and the campus will be interconnected to yet another strong international computing collaboration.
The LHC went through its first phase of activation on September 10. Technical issues arose with the massive machine, slowing the startup process, which is slated to resume in early 2009. Andrew York, a UT Knoxville graduate student in physics, and postdoctoral researcher José Lazoflores were in the control room as it was switched on for the first time.

Spanier, who more than 11 years ago worked on some of the initial studies into how a device like the LHC would even be possible, says there is a great deal of excitement among the more than 2,000 scientists around the world who are participating in the project.

“To have UT Knoxville involved in a project like this truly makes us ready for the world,” he says.