Smashing our way to understanding

Not many people get the chance to truly change how we see the world. But undergraduate and graduate students - working with UA physics professors Dr. John Rutherfoord and Dr. Michael Shupe - are doing just that. With engineers and other faculty, they’ve created a new kind of calorimeter-a device that captures what happens when protons smash together-capable of withstanding unprecedented collision rates. That’s important when tracking the 600 million impacts per second in the world’s largest particle accelerator, where this new technology plays a starring role. Thanks to Rutherfoord and his team, scientists can now better track those collision dynamics and may finally find proof for theories illuminating earliest moments of our universe.