Pitt Researchers Play Important Role in Large Hadron Collider Project

Members of the Pitt team working on the Large Hadron Collider are pictured in the ATLAS experiment control room at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. From left, Vakho Tsulaia, graduate student Reza Yoosoofmiya, Thomas Kittelmann, Damien Prieur, and Pitt physics and astronomy professor Joseph Boudreau. Tsulaia, Kittelmann, and Prieur are Pitt postdoctoral researchers.

Last month, lunchtime in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) cafeteria allowed for games of “Spot the Nobel Laureate” as the world’s foremost physicists gathered in Geneva for one of the most significant events in the history of science: the long-awaited initiation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a device that could reveal the basic structure of space, time, and matter.

Pitt physics and astronomy professor Joseph Boudreau joined that notable clientele along with other researchers and students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the University’s School of Arts and Sciences. Pitt physicists have contributed to the massive project since 1994, beginning with now professor emeritus William Cleland, and have since helped develop the equipment meant to uncover the universe’s principal particles.

Constructed nearly 600 feet beneath CERN, the collider boasts a 17-mile circumference and $10 billion budget, making it the largest, priciest scientific instrument in history. The LHC functions via twin proton beams that barrel into one another at speeds approaching that of light. On Nov. 30, 10 days after the first collisions, the LHC’s beams accelerated to 1.18 teravolts, the highest energy ever recorded. The goal is to accelerate each beam to 7 teravolts—a fraction lower than the speed of light—for a collision of 14 teravolts.

Boudreau belongs to a group of Pitt faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students working on an experiment based at the collider known as ATLAS, a collaboration of 2,900 scientists from more than 172 universities and labs. The largest particle detector ever built, ATLAS searches the energy created by the proton collisions for undiscovered forces that may have shaped the universe and that could provide insight into some of the most perplexing mysteries in physics, including the existence of dark matter and extra dimensions of space.

Boudreau and Pitt postdoctoral researchers Thomas Kittelmann and Vakho Tsulaia—both working out of CERN—were the primary developers of software that monitors and displays particle activity inside the detector. Cleland worked with professors Vittorio Paolone and Vladimir Savinov on Pitt’s contribution to developing the electronic circuitry in ATLAS that enables scientists to single out interesting particle events for observation. Professor James Mueller worked on LHC simulation software. Also representing Pitt in the project were postdoctoral researcher Damien Prieur at CERN, graduate students Kevin O’Connell, Kevin Sapp, and Shanti Wendler, as well as Reza Yoosoofmiya at CERN.
More exciting to Boudreau and his contemporaries than the LHC’s scale is its potential to generate energy levels not seen since the birth of the universe, he recently explained from Geneva.

“The LHC is meant to help physicists understand how matter behaves at its highest energies, such as during the Big Bang,” Boudreau said. “We’re also searching for the particles that could give us a fuller understanding of matter’s basic structure. This is new ground in physics, and we have the potential to see interactions and particles that haven’t been seen before. The atmosphere here is very exciting.”

The most coveted particle is the elusive Higgs boson. It is the only missing piece of the Standard Model, which theorizes that all visible matter stems from interactions between the three elementary particles: quarks, leptons, and bosons. The Higgs boson is thought to be central to the interaction of these particles—and therefore an integral part of the world—yet it’s never been observed. The LHC could prove or disprove the boson’s existence and possibly cast suspicion on the Standard Model, which has guided particle physics for the past 50 years

Years could pass before the LHC produces energy levels high enough to detect Higgs, Boudreau said. But six years since he started working on the LHC, Boudreau joins his colleagues in celebrating the collider’s hard-won early successes. Technical problems have scuttled a handful of launch dates, including a September 2008 setback, when ruptured magnets required a year of repairs.

“These early collisions are not very exciting, but they show that the LHC is back on track,” Boudreau said. “When I consider how long it took to get to this point and that we could have the highest energy levels in the world within the next year, just getting the beams to collide is a huge milestone.”

More information is available on CERN’s LHC Web site at lhc.web.cern.ch.