A University physicist is contributing to a massive international project that may yield important breakthroughs in the field of sub-atomic physics.
Physics professor Jim Brau has been involved with the development of the International Linear Collider, which just received more than $800,000 in new grant funding, for 20 years.
“There was a linear collider at Stanford that I worked on,” Brau said. “It’s basically kind of a prototype for what we’re doing now.”
A linear collider is a type of particle accelerator, which accelerates the smallest bits of matter to an enormous energy before smashing them into one another.
“It collides particles together at very high energy,” Brau said.
By exploring the results of these collisions, physicists can gain understanding about the basic structure of the universe on the tiniest levels of existence – the building blocks of all things.
“This is a very fundamental science – looking into the structure of the universe,” Brau said. “I think that an enlightened society … must explore and try to understand the nature of our universe. It’s a question that goes back to the beginning of mankind. We’re just doing it with the most advanced tools.”
According to Brau, the ILC has been designated by numerous scientists around the world as the necessary next step in sub-atomic physics research.
Development of the project has taken a long time not only because of the search for funds, but because of the lengthy process of coming to an agreement on many of the technical details in constructing the collider.
“There are a number of different ways to do it,” Brau said. “We’ll have these pretty well nailed down in the next one or two years.”
The international partnership working to make the collider a reality will have a preliminary plan drafted and ready for review by the end of this year, Brau said.
“We’re still trying to settle on these parameters, but it’s somewhere between 30 and 50 kilometers in length,” he said. “It’ll probably be on the longer side.”
The current plan is to begin construction in 2010.
“There’s a lot of (research and development) that needs to be done before 2010,” Brau said. “It’s going to be a very active next five years to get to that start point.”
The collider should be operational by 2015.
“It takes about five or six years to build,” Brau said.
One of the questions about the collider that has yet to be decided is where it will be built.
The group working on the project is currently considering two locations in Europe, one or two locations in Asia and one location near Chicago in the United States.
“These are being studied for technical reasons,” Brau said. However, the ultimate decision will most likely be political. The country that decides to make the biggest show of support for the project will most likely get to host the collider, Brau said.
“I think it’s important for the U.S. to make a big effort to be the host of this international project and re-establish its leadership in the field of sub-atomic physics,” he said.
Aside from the scientific value of such a project, Brau points to the numerous practical benefits of this type of research, both intentional and unintentional.
As an example Brau cited synchrotron radiation, which is a by-product of round colliders. This type of radiation has numerous medical applications.
“The World Wide Web was invented by particle physicists as a new way of communicating between laboratories,” Brau said. “If you put people together who are working on trying to explore the limits of our basic understanding, the results are unexpected benefits.”

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