AMES, Iowa - Just take a look at that board full of
electronics, said W. Thomas Meyer during a recent tour of his
lab on the fourth floor of Iowa State University's
Zaffarano Physics Addition.
There are actually five computers on that thin, 15.75-inch
square, said Meyer, an Iowa State adjunct research professor of
physics and
astronomy. Hundreds of the readout boards are used by
physicists to process signals from one of the experiments at
the Large
Hadron Collider, the multibillion-dollar machine that
accelerates particles to nearly the speed of light around
17-miles of underground tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, and
crashes them together. Then Meyer explained how special
software allows experimental physicists to coordinate all those
boards and the information they're sorting and
collecting.
And those tools, he said, represent more than a decade of his
life's work to help physicists solve a few more mysteries
of the universe. Meyer was part of the team that designed the
readout boards and wrote the controlling software.
So Meyer will be paying attention on Tuesday, March 30, when
the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as
CERN) will
make the first attempt to collide proton beams in the Large
Hadron Collider at a total energy of 7 trillion electron volts.
That far surpasses the collider's own world record of
collisions at 2.36 trillion electron volts.
"With two beams at 3.5 TeV (tera [or trillion] electron
volts), we're on the verge of launching the LHC physics
program," said Steve Myers, CERN's director for
accelerators and technology in a statement. "But we've
still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining
the beams up is a challenge in itself: It's a bit like
firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide
half way."
Iowa State's department of physics and astronomy will mark
Tuesday's launch of the collider's new physics program
with several events: A webcast of the high-energy physics at
CERN will be 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Room 18 of Physics Hall.
Post-doctoral researchers and physics students will analyze the
collision data as it comes in and will monitor the performance
of the ATLAS detector, one of two giant, general purpose
detectors at the collider that measure the paths, energies and
identities of the particles created when protons or lead ions
collide. There is also a poster and a live display outside Room
30 of Physics Hall showing data from the ATLAS experiment. And
the ISU Physics and Astronomy Club will display research
posters in the lower level of the Memorial Union.
Meyer and Iowa State physicists have been working on the
ATLAS experiment since 1999.
Supported by a research contract with the U.S. Department of
Energy, the Iowa Staters have focused on the experiment's
pixel
detector. The pixel detector is a subunit deep within the
ATLAS experiment that uses 80 million pixels to make precise
measurements as close to the particle collisions as
possible.
Meyer said the pixel detector is like a digital camera that can
snap 40 million pictures every second.
And now that the pixel detector will be taking data at the
highest energies ever, Meyer isn't going to let his April 6
retirement from Iowa State stop his physics work.
"Now that our experiment is just turning on, I'm not
going to turn my back and walk away," he said.
After a physics career filled with 75 trips to Europe (plus one
to Asia), he'll likely be sticking closer to home. But,
thanks to the World Wide Web invented at CERN in 1989 to help
physicists around the globe share their data, he'll still
be able to work on the experiment.
Meyer is already helping with a planned 2018 upgrade to the
pixel detector. (Because it is so close to the particle beams
and the radiation they produce, Meyer said the pixel detector
will be damaged over time. And because the detectors are so
complex, it's already time to start planning for a new and
improved model.)
And what about the Large Hadron Collider's search for the
Higgs
boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model of
particle physics? The model theorizes that space is filled with
a Higgs field and particles acquire their masses by interacting
with the field. Detection and study of the Higgs could answer
basic questions about why matter has mass and how particles
acquire mass.
"I would be very surprised," Meyer said, "if we
don't see the Higgs over the next year or two."