Departments
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Week of 9 January 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 15 |
Feature
Article
Route of the matter
BU has role in developing world's largest particle accelerator
by Eric McHenry
A decade ago, Boston University played a seminal role in securing initial funds from the U.S. government for the Superconducting Super Collider -- a particle accelerator of unprecedented scale that was going to be built in Texas.
Lawrence Sulak, chairman of the department of physics at CAS, says that the University served as an unofficial link between U.S. scientists, Department of Energy officials, Congress, and the inter-national physics community.
"Robert Roe, who at the time chaired the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee, credits his support and the initiation of funding for the Super Collider to his interactions with Boston University," Sulak says. "Chancellor Silber and President Westling arranged tours of laboratories in Hamburg, Germany, and Geneva, Switzerland, so that those ladies and gentleman could see the economic impact of investments in particle physics basic research."
Such research holds the potential to yield tremendous raw knowledge about the disposition of matter. The SSC project, however, was scuttled in the "first throes of solving the budget deficit," Sulak says.
Despite this setback, Boston University is working to remain at the forefront of particle physics research. It is one of only a handful of U.S. universities, for example, that is contributing scientists to the design and construction of both ATLAS and CMS, the two particle detectors that will operate at the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC will be built at Geneva's CERN laboratory, and with the SSC out of the picture, will make Geneva the world's hub of particle physics research. On December 8, officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and CERN assembled in Washington, D.C., to sign paperwork solidifying a U.S. commitment of $531 million and about 500 scientists to the LHC.
"This is essentially the second best choice," says George Zimmerman, a CAS professor of physics who invented a set of leads to power the LHC's superconducting magnets.
"If there was to be no SSC," Sulak adds, "then all of us were going to take our investments and move them to Geneva, in particular the software developed to communicate with the thousand or so other Ph.D.'s from Russia and Europe who were to work on the SSC."
Although the venue has shifted, the stateside contribution to what physicists are calling the "energy frontier" will remain prominent. J. Scott Whitaker, professor of physics and associate dean of CAS, says that many of the LHC's tools will be both designed and produced in the United States.
"The construction of the detectors and the development of the technology are going to be done by U.S. groups in a number of cases," he says.
For example, Whitaker and other BU faculty have joined professors from Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, and Tufts to create the Boston Muon Consortium. The group's activities will include the building of large muon (a type of particle) detectors for use at CERN.
The LHC will be operational about 2005. With a circumference of approximately 16 miles (less than a third the original projected girth of the SSC), its accelerator ring will occupy an existing tunnel under the Swiss and French border. The two detectors, whose function is to observe and record billions of particle collisions, will be situated at different points on the ring.
The information they gather, when framed in scientists' parlance, might seem esoteric. In fact, it will be rudimentary. Many physicists suspect, for example, that an