Scientists Cheer Restart of "World's Largest Physics Experiment" in Switzerland

Almost two years ago, Rutgers physicists joined the world’s scientific community to celebrate the startup of “the world’s largest physics experiment” – a European particle accelerator designed to reveal some of nature’s most basic subatomic particles.

Excitement quickly turned to disappointment when a magnet failure one week after that September 2008 startup put the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, out of service for more than a year. The LHC is operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and is located beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

Rutgers researchers made good use of the downtime, and as a result, feel more prepared than ever to conduct groundbreaking physics research now that the machine has begun smashing protons together at world-record energy levels. The LHC’s 27 kilometer particle racetrack started running again last November and on March 30 marked its first collisions at 7 trillion electron volts – its operating level for the next two years of experiments.

“Ordinarily you don’t get an extra year to prepare,” said Amitabh Lath, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, School of Arts and Sciences, reflecting on how physicists at Rutgers and elsewhere used the machine’s downtime to refine techniques for gathering and analyzing data.

“The CMS experiment is a lot more robust,” he said, referring to one of the accelerator’s two major collision detectors, the Compact Muon Solenoid. “It’s at an unprecedented level of readiness.” Rutgers physicists built electronics for the current CMS instrumentation and for a planned upgrade, and will be using the CMS to search for particles and interactions that no one has yet conceived.

Lath noted that this “tune-up” work would have happened whether or not the LHC suffered its unfortunate outage. Two decades earlier at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator near Chicago, physicists refined their data-gathering techniques as the accelerator ran, which meant that they couldn’t have full confidence in their early results.

Yet Rutgers felt a downside to the LHC’s delay, admits Lath. Student work got postponed. “We have two doctoral students who started in 2005, and they may not finish until 2011,” he said.

Rutgers is ready for LHC research in other ways – it has a strong working relationship between its high-energy experimentalists and theorists, a relationship not commonplace at other institutions. It has a robust infrastructure of computing power and high speed communications. And it has a team of five faculty, two senior scientists, 10 graduate students, four postdoctoral researchers, and several undergraduates at the starting blocks for the next race in high-energy physics. Previous story - Rutgers Focus, November 19, 2008