‘Tis the season for science at the bottom of the Earth. Researchers are flying to the South Pole from all over the globe to take advantage of the “ warm” summer months, when temperatures average minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit.
ATLAS, a particle physics experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, boasts 2000-plus members from 35 countries. But on a map showing where those members come from, one continent is almost mark-free: Africa.
Every time Fermilab scientist Tom Schwarz starts up SpartyJet, he inwardly grimaces. The computer program works well. It does a fine job of finding and recording jets—sprays of subatomic particles that emerge from collisions involving protons.
Meeting in CERN’s Restaurant 1, anthropologist Arpita Roy of the University of California, Berkeley is quick to declare that she will not be having any more coffee today. She has begun drinking multiple cups per day as she meets with CERN physicists to learn about their work.
They started out scanning the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI@ home. They’ve plotted chess moves, battled malaria, and folded proteins, all from their home computers. Now, volunteers are tackling particle physics with LHC@home.
The Terascale is an energy region named for the tera, or million million, electronvolts of energy needed to access it. Physicists are standing at its threshold, poised to enter this uncharted territory of the subatomic world.
With so much work to do on so many aspects of the Large Hadron Collider—the accelerator, detectors, software, physics, and so on—it’s hard not to get a bit lost.
Among the 10,000 people from around the world who are working on the Large Hadron Collider, 1000 hail from universities and national labs in the United States.
Every time I take visitors to see the Large Hadron Collider, I’m reminded of the extent of the international collaboration that has made this project possible.
We are on the eve of one of the greatest experiments in the history of physics. The Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer ring straddling the Swiss-French border, is pushing the frontier of exploration into the fundamentals of our universe.
