Research Areas
Proton Accelerator-Based Physics
The journey to the energy frontier begins with the proton accelerator. Capable of producing the highest-energy particle beams made by man, the proton accelerator allows physicists to study the smallest things human beings have ever observed. At the same time, proton accelerators can recreate the conditions of the early universe, producing particles that were abundant a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. By colliding proton beams into targets, many other particles, such as antiprotons, mesons, muons and neutrinos, can also be produced for multiple types of experiments.
The world's largest operating proton accelerator, the Tevatron, resides at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The Tevatron collides protons and antiprotons in an underground ring, four miles in circumference at an energy of two trillion electron volts. Millions of these proton-antiproton collisions pass through the CDF and DZero detectors every second, where physicists record them for later analysis. Physicists also use Fermilab's high-energy proton beam to create neutrino particles for the NuMI-MINOS experiment.
In 2008, the energy frontier moves to Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider will create almost a billion proton-proton collisions per second at an energy of 14 trillion electron volts, seven times higher than any particle collider has previously achieved. It will operate at the CERN laboratory in a 27-kilometer circular tunnel about 100 meters underground. More than 1,200 scientists from U.S. universities and institutions participate in the design, construction and operation of the machine. U.S. scientists will remain active leaders at the energy frontier both here in the U.S. and abroad at CERN.
Supporting Information
Counting down at CMS
Ellie Lockner spends a lot of time in the pit. Not a pit for racecar drivers, though particles will soon zoom by close to the speed of light. Instead Lockner, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, works at CERN in the pit of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.
As one of the two largest experiments at the LHC, CMS is essentially a 100-megapixel camera that will take 40 million pictures of particle interactions a second. When the LHC turns on the summer of 2008, scientists will access a new energy frontier that holds secrets about the fundamental laws of physics and the nature of the universe.
Lockner joined the CMS collaboration in 2005 and started working on electrical readout boards for the hadron calorimeter, or HCAL, a component that measures the energy of particles. She helped assemble the boards and then followed them to Switzerland, where she relocated in June 2007. Now she is helping to commission the detector by making sure that the HCAL boards are working properly. “I feel very attached to the detector,” says Lockner.
Prior to becoming a graduate student, Lockner taught high school physics and math for six years. She earned her B.S. at McGill University.
