UVic Has Sights Set On Subatomic Action

The world’s biggest science experiment—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-km circular tunnel buried 100 metres underground and straddling the French-Swiss border—is powering up again with the subterranean action not only taking place in Europe but also at the University of Victoria.
     The LHC is a giant ring built by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) to accelerate beams made up of trillions of protons into deliberate head-on collisions. The naked eye cannot track such imperceptible action, but two large multi-purpose detectors will meticulously record the debris to allow researchers to explore space and time, push through new frontiers of particle physics and probe the possible existence of new space dimensions. The UVic-ATLAS team is responsible for designing and building several crucial components of the ATLAS-Canada detector and, as a founding institute, has closely collaborated with the other 10 Canadian institutions involved in the Canadian ATLAS adventure.
     “The circulation of proton beams in the LHC is a huge milestone towards beginning the scientific discovery program we’ve been working towards for nearly 20 years,” says ATLAS-Canada spokesperson Dr. Rob McPherson, UVic adjunct professor and Institute of Particle Physics scientist. “We look forward to the next few weeks where we will start colliding the LHC beams and increasing their energy. We can look forward to exciting breakthroughs during 2010.”
     The complete circulation of proton beams occurred on Friday, Nov. 20 with the facility now starting to ramp up enough energy to record collisions in mid-December—an early holiday gift for particle physicists around the world. Data from the debris will be analyzed over the next decade.
     Thanks to the early work of UVic particle physicists Drs. Alan Astbury and Richard Keeler in the mid 1980s, UVic physics professor and founding ATLAS-Canada spokesperson Dr. Michel Lefebvre along with his colleagues Drs. Justin Albert, Robert Kowalewski and Randall Sobie are ready with the rest of the UVic-ATLAS team to pore over the invaluable data.
     Ongoing project updates are posted at press.web.cern.ch and you can follow the action through Twitter at http://twitter.com/cern.
 

-- 30 --