Great Moments: TRIUMF to CERN

Five of the eight scientists who helped UVic become a founding partner in TRIUMF
Five of the eight scientists who helped UVic become a founding partner in TRIUMF

From TRIUMF to the Large Hadron Collider

When the news broke in summer 2012 that the elusive Higgs boson — the particle believed to be responsible for the mass of all things — had at last been detected, many UVic physicists were in the thick of the global celebration. And so they should be. The achievement caps decades of close collaboration with the TRI-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF), Canada’s national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics, which UVic co-founded in 1969 in Vancouver. TRIUMF is home to the world’s largest proton cyclotron, and attracts top physicists from around the world to work on research in particle and nuclear physics, and nuclear medicine. Over the years, TRIUMF has been vital to UVic’s leadership of and participation in a number of international particle physics projects. Among them is ATLAS, one of two large detectors that record proton collisions at the massive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, where hints of the Higgs boson were found. UVic physicists brought Canada into the ATLAS project in 1992 and are responsible for several key components of the detector. (The ATLAS data centre is also housed at TRIUMF.) Soon a new era of discovery will begin at TRIUMF, with completion of the UVic-led ARIEL accelerator, which will expand Canada’s ability to produce and study isotopes for physics and medicine.