The marvelous discoveries of the quark and gluon may soon give up their spots as physics’ most revolutionary developments. An international collaborative effort is underway to unravel the most fundamental mysteries of the universe.
U of T physicist Professor Robert Orr, is the principle investigator of the Canadian arm of the project ATLAS and recently received the 2006 ORION Discovery Award for his work on what is the world’s largest scientific experiment.
“Many of the things we see around us have to do with mass, but nobody has any idea where mass comes from,” Prof Orr explained.
ATLAS is a particle detector experiment located at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The experiment is made up of several parts, including an accelerator that speeds up particles and steers their collision toward ATLAS, the particle detector that measures and analyzes what’s left behind. It may revolutionize the field of particle physics by providing answers to questions that have puzzled physicists for centuries.
“All of space…is permeated by what we call a quantum field, the Higgs field. Now if you put energy into this field you can produce real Higgs particles out of it,” explained Orr.
These subatomic particles are also known as the Higgs bosons, and are predicted to be responsible for giving mass to elementary particles, which constitute all matter. Without it, the universe as we know it would not exist.
The discovery of new particles takes place underground in a 25 km-long circular tunnel, spanning the border between Switzerland and France, ending at the ATLAS particle detector that will analyze the subatomic debris produced from the collisions of high-speed protons.
“[ATLAS] is anticipated to identify a wide range of particles that we cannot see but can detect gravitationally,” explained Orr, including the undiscovered Higgs boson.
“It’s as if the universe is [in] a frozen state. It is ice and we want to study the properties of water. So we have to melt a little bit of the universe back into the primordial state.”
The logistics of constructing and operating a system as large as ATLAS has long-lasting practical implications. For example, superconductivity, the near-perfect transmission of electrical energy, has only recently been found to be feasible at temperatures above absolute zero.
“In building this big superconducting accelerator, we have to develop technologies that don’t exist at the moment,” Orr explained. “Superconductivity is a very important technology, and one can imagine enormous gains in energy efficiency, such as power transmission, electric motors, and trains.”
Orr further explained that the use of these technologies are difficult to predict, but like most physics research, the advances are revolutionary in the long run,
“We can do things now that a thousand years ago people thought were just magic,” he said.
In its entirety, ATLAS involves 2,000 scientists and engineers at 151 institutes in 34 countries, and will be fully constructed by 2007.
