A team of University professors and graduate students are researching the Big Bang and the forces of the universe at the famous Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
On March 30, the researchers celebrated the first successful head-on collision of 7 trillion electron volts, a world record high-energy collision, at Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider.
“It’s very exciting after waiting so many years. It’s exciting to be on the threshold of discovery,” said professor Jim Brau, director of the University’s Center for High Energy.
Physics and the group research leader for ATLAS, one of six particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. The experiment began in late 2009 and seeks to learn about the basic forces that have shaped the universe since the beginning of time, according to the ATLAS Web site.
Graduate students Jacob Searcy, Elizabeth Ptacek and Andreas Reinsch are researching in Switzerland, while Brau, graduate student Mary Robinson, professors David Strom and Raymond Frey, and associate professor Eric Torrence are active in Eugene.
The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) collide protons at extremely high energies to recreate events that occurred in the early universe.
“The collisions produce particles that have not been produced since the Big Bang,” Strom said.
CERN’s facilities represent the ideal organization for the team’s research because it is the most technologically advanced site in the world.
“CERN issues the highest-energy collisions. It opens a new window onto the early universe,” Torrence said.
The group wants to discover what dark matter is. Dark matter, invisible matter that exudes a gravitational force on galaxies and stars, makes up 80 to 90 percent of matter in the universe. The team is looking for unbalanced energy that results from the proton collisions in the experiments because that could be dark matter. They are also searching for Higgs particle, which gives mass to other particles.
“It’s the particle in the standard model theory that makes all the other particles possible,” Frey said. Brau said the Higgs particle is “a fundamental particle that is responsible for the unifying forces of nature.”
Reinsch, one of the grad students in Geneva, is researching quantum black holes, which are microscopic black holes that decay quickly.
“The kind of thing he’s looking for, you can only see if extra dimensions exist,” Strom said.
The theory of a multi-dimensional universe is not the stuff of science fiction. It’s a scientific theory that the universe originally had 10 dimensions, six of which collapsed together into the quantum (microscopic) world while the remaining four dimensions became the macroscopic world.
“It’s possible to produce quantum black holes if you allow other dimensions to exist. If we find quantum black holes, it tells us that the extra dimensions are real,” Strom said.
Robinson, another grad student, spent six months in Geneva before returning to Eugene recently. She has enjoyed the research so far.
“It’s an opportunity to find things out about the universe that we previously didn’t know,” she said.
The University team is responsible for sorting through the massive amount of data that will be gathered from the experiments.
“The challenge is going through the avalanche of data and finding things that are interesting,” Torrence said.
The University joined the ATLAS experiment in 2005 in collaboration with other researchers. The professors and graduate students expect this research to continue for several years.
“We’re hoping we’ll understand how forces in the universe are connected to each other,” Torrence said.
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