Understanding our universe and the laws that
govern it allows us to shape the world in
which we live. With support from the US Department
of Energy and the National Science Foundation,
particle physicists at American universities
and national labs are making significant progress
in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge,
including the recent discovery of the Higgs
boson. This discovery led to the 2013 Nobel
Prize in physics for Francois Englert and
Peter Higgs for correctly predicting the particle's
existence. But the story of the impact of
American researchers doesn't end there.
Mankind has asked certain questions for as
long as anyone can recall -- questions of
life, death, existence and the very nature
of the universe itself. While not all such
questions have been answered, there are some
for which science has made tremendous progress.
For instance, we now know that the universe
began about 14 billion years ago in an unimaginable
explosion called the Big Bang. The universe
has been expanding and cooling since then,
leading to the familiar world in which we
live.
Another question about which we've learned
a lot over the past few hundred years is the
ultimate nature of matter itself. Abandoning
the now discredited elements of earth, water,
air and fire, we are now certain that matter
is made of atoms. Atoms are made of protons,
neutrons, and electrons. And the last thirty
years has taught us that even the protons
and neutrons are made of smaller building
blocks called quarks.
When you combine these building blocks with
four known forces, we can describe everything
in our universe. These forces are gravity,
electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear
forces.
However, not all mysteries have been solved.
We have discovered a substance called antimatter
that is the opposite of ordinary matter. The
problem is that we see a lot less of it than
we expect. We don't know why.
Further, it's quite possible that quarks
and leptons are not the smallest building
blocks of the cosmos, and it's equally possible
that there are other forces still to be found.
Until recently, scientists could only speculate
on the origins of mass and it was only in
the summer of 2012 that it seemed that we
might have finally answered that question,
with the discovery of a particle called the
Higgs boson.
The laboratory at which many of these important
questions might be answered is the CERN laboratory
in Geneva Switzerland.
There are several detectors, weighing many
thousands of tons, which are arrayed around
a huge particle accelerator called the Large
Hadron Collider or LHC.
One of the biggest and more complex is called
the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS. The CMS
detector is enormous. It is 50 feet high,
50 feet wide and 70 feet long and it weighs
over 14,000 tons. The best way to describe
it is it is a huge, 100 megapixel camera,
able to take 40 million pictures a second.
The detector is so large that it takes over
3,000 physicists to operate it and analyze
the data it records.
The pictures this detector takes are of collisions
between pairs of protons travelling at nearly
the speed of light, recreating the conditions
that were common when the universe began.
Using this constant barrage of collisions,
scientists collect data that allow them to
better understand the laws that govern the
universe and to get closer to finding answers
to timeless questions.
The CERN laboratory is a vibrant international
research facility, drawing physicists from
around the globe. The single largest national
group of scientists that work on the CMS detector
are faculty, staff members and graduate students
from American universities and laboratories,
and they have designed important and technologically-challenging
portions of the detector.
The U.S. has made major contributions to the
CMS detector, to ATLAS, to the whole program.
In particular, we have in the U.S. been really
key in the tracking system, to the calorimetry,
offline software, computing- essentially every
realm, including all of the analysis. Many,
many of the papers, many of the Higgs analyses
have very strong U.S. involvement, and, in
fact, it's a worldwide community that the
U.S. is part of, and it took that big push
from the U.S., as well as all the other countries
of course, to make this program a big success.
Significant technical work was performed inside
the US, although eventually all the components
and many of the researchers travelled to CERN
Once at CERN, scientists consult with colleagues
from around the world. Scientific results
are critically evaluated in large meetings
and in small groups. Sometimes the most crucial
conversations occur one-on-one in the coffee
shop in Building 40, which houses offices
for physicists working on the LHC.
Visiting CERN is scientifically intense, but
there are also opportunities to relax, from
games of Frisbee on the lawn, to hiking and
skiing opportunities in the nearby Alps. Strolls
along the scenic Lake Lehman and Rhone River
in downtown Geneva are added benefits.
But for all the amenities of Switzerland,
the thing that brings US physicists to CERN
is the science. If you ask a physicist why
they're there, a common theme emerges.
I work at the LHC because it is the world's
largest and most energetic accelerator, and
this allows us to study some really interesting
physics at CMS.
The LHC is the highest-energy particle collider
in the world, and it's the best place to
explore the basic nature of the universe.
I do research at the LHC because I would like
to be a part of the next big discoveries in
particle physics, 'cause I think that will
happen here.
Over the next decade, the LHC and the CMS
experiment will be probing the very frontier
of knowledge. While the observation of the
Higgs boson was the first discovery that will
go into the textbooks, it certainly won't
be the last. CMS is an international collaboration,
filled with world-class caliber minds; and
researchers from American institutions will
continue to play crucial roles.
