CERN

Canada gives $12 million to boost power of Large Hadron Collider

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 17:51:06 +0000

Canada gives $12 million to boost power of Large Hadron Collider

noreen.rasbach Mon, 06/25/2018 - 13:51

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Science Minister Kirsty Duncan announced in Vancouver today that the federal government will give $10 million to the Large Hadron Collider, with TRIUMF giving another $2 million in kind (photo courtesy of Innovation, Science and Economic Development)

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

Global Lens

CERN

Department of Physics

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Research & Innovation

Subheadline

U of T physicists eager to see what secrets the upgraded particle accelerator will reveal next

For more than a decade, a small team of high-energy physicists and graduate students from the University of Toronto have helped push the boundaries of scientific knowledge at the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Today, the Canadian government and TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre, announced a $12-million investment to give a major performance boost to the Large Hadron Collider, known as the most massive and complex scientific experiment in human history.

The funding will go towards mission critical components in support of the new High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC or HiLumi), with Vancouver-based TRIUMF leading production of the Canadian components. HiLumi, which had a groundbreaking ceremony earlier this month, is expected to be operational by 2026.

“I am pleased to announce support for Canada’s outstanding researchers, engineers and technicians, whose combined efforts will further our reputation as a global leader in particle physics,” said federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan in a news release.

The Large Hadron Collider, a high-energy particle accelerator operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), runs in a 27-kilometre circular tunnel buried 100 metres below the surface of the earth underneath France and Switzerland.

Since opening in 2008, it has enabled scientists to recreate the conditions that existed a billionth of a second after the Big Bang — and to study them in a controlled way. In 2012, researchers announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that gives other particles mass and makes life possible.

“Researchers at the University of Toronto welcome this important support by the Canadian government to help make one of the world’s most important scientific projects possible,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation.

“For more than a decade, U of T researchers have worked side-by-side with colleagues from universities across Canada, at TRIUMF, and around the world to push our knowledge of the fundamental structure of the universe. We look forward to being a part of even more critical breakthroughs as we continue to play a role with the HiLumi project for decades to come.”

One of the areas in which U of T has been involved is the ATLAS detector, one of the main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

Right now, the U of T team on ATLAS comprises six faculty, four postdoctoral researchers and 20 graduate students. In the past decade, approximately 50 U of T students have worked at CERN, said U of T physics Professor Robert Orr.

In 2012, the U of T Atlas team (which included Orr and colleagues David Bailey, Peter Krieger, Pierre Savard, Pekka Sinervo, Richard Teuscher and William Trischuk) and their 2,500 ATLAS colleagues from 35 countries played a key role in the hunt for the Higgs boson.

The ATLAS detector, key components of which were built at U of T, was designed to search for new particles in the highest mass collisions of high-energy proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.

U of T faculty and graduate students sifted through the massive amounts of data from ATLAS using SciNet super computing resources at U of T to identify collisions containing Higgs boson candidates.

For HiLumi, the Canadian research community will use its world-leading cryomodule technology to build five new particle accelerator components known as crab cavity cryogenic modules, a TRIUMF news release explained.

These sophisticated, ultra low temperature boxes will house crab cavities that “rotate bunches of subatomic particles before they smash together, significantly increasing the number of collisions, or luminosity, of the Large Hadron Collider.”

The souped-up particle accelerator “is very good news — something we’ve been waiting for for quite some time,” said Sinervo. “It will ensure Canada has the official status at CERN that it so appropriately deserves given all the contributions Canadians have made to the experiments and the accelerator.”

The assembly of the crab cavity housing, a cryostat that will serve as a high-performance coldbox, keeping the cavities at their operating temperature (photo by Maximilien Brice/CERN)

The discovery of the Higgs boson was huge, confirming the existence of all the particles making up the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the existence of the mechanism that gives mass to all the fundamental particles, Orr explained.

Nevertheless, much remains to be discovered and puzzles resolved, such as: Why the pattern of masses? What is dark matter?

“In the context of the Large Hadron Collider, the most important puzzle is the surprisingly small mass of the Higgs,” Orr said.

“Our theoretical understanding leads us to believe this small mass of the Higgs implies there should be a whole zoo of ‘supersymmetric’ particles observable at the LHC. They have not been,” he said.

“It could be that the intensity of the present LHC is insufficient to observe them. That is the main motivation for the HL-LHC — to increase the intensity of the machine to the point where we can observe these new particles.”

On the other hand, Orr said the non-observation of this supersymmetry may also be telling because it “would finally demonstrate that we have to think of some other mechanism that keeps the mass of the Higgs small.

“This could lead to a complete sea change in our understanding of the basic structure of matter.”

With files from Jenny Hall

In Geneva, where U of T scientists are on the frontier of physics with world’s largest particle accelerator

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 04:00:00 +0000

In Geneva, where U of T scientists are on the frontier of physics with world’s largest particle accelerator

geoff.vendeville Wed, 08/30/2017 - 00:00

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CERN, the international lab near Geneva, is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator (photo by Claudia Marcelloni/CERN)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Department of Physics

CERN

GENEVA – Working on a small piece of the world's largest experiment, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture.

Kyle Cormier, a University of Toronto grad student in particle physics, is a member of U of T's research group at CERN, the sprawling international lab on the French-Swiss border that is home to the largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

His job? Researching a silicon microchip for a planned upgrade to the 7,000-tonne Atlas detector, one of four major experiments at the LHC. He has designed, tested and redesigned the chip to withstand extreme cold and radiation exposure – all so that it can read data from proton collisions without needing a tune-up for at least a decade.

It may not sound glamorous, but it's the type of precise, exacting work that led CERN researchers to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that had been theorized in the 1960s.

“If you’re on a big hike up a mountain, you’re stepping over root branches working your way up,” Cormier says.

Professor Pekka Sinervo and U of T students, including Vincent Pascuzzi, Joey Carter, Laurelle Veloce, Kyle Cormier (seated right), at CERN outside Geneva (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

At first glance, CERN, a collection of low-slung concrete buildings on the outskirts of Geneva, doesn't look like a state-of-the-art, multibillion-dollar research facility. But deep underground, the accelerator races protons around a 27-kilometre ring until they are travelling nearly the speed of light and then smashes them together. Like crash scene investigators looking for clues in rubble, scientists analyze the debris from the collisions, which send subatomic particles flying in every direction.

CERN scientists used this method to detect the Higgs boson in 2012, a particle explaining why others have mass. Now they're digging even deeper, investigating questions such as the nature of dark matter.

The mysterious type of matter, which makes up more than a quarter of the universe, has puzzled scientists since the first clues about its existence arose in the 1930s through astronomical observation and calculations.

“We’re at the point where we’ve looked where the light’s brightest,” says Pekka Sinervo, a professor of experimental high energy physics at U of T. “Now we’re looking in all the dark corners that are hard to investigate.”

Physics humour on a wall at CERN (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Researchers may still be a long way off from answering the dark matter riddle, but some breakthrough is just a matter of time, says Laurelle Veloce, who is also studying particle physics at U of T and working at CERN.

“You just put one foot in front of the other and eventually you know someone will find something,” she says.

The U of T research group is the largest Canadian team working on the Atlas experiment, with 17 graduate students, four postdocs and six faculty members. Over the summer, undergraduate students can take a summer course at CERN.

Olivier Arnaez, now a U of T postdoc, spent years searching for the Higgs. When CERN researchers had gathered enough statistical evidence to confirm the discovery of a new particle, there was no eureka moment, he recalls – just relief.

“We were happy because we knew we could sleep soon,” he says, “which didn’t happen because we then had to investigate more properties of the Higgs.” The celebrations involved litres of champagne and Nobel prizes for the theorists who proposed the Higgs mechanism decades earlier.

Years of research at CERN haven’t been without setbacks, however. Only nine days after the first successful beam tests in 2008, a soldering error caused an accident that put the project behind schedule by more than 18 months. And last year, researchers who thought they had discovered another new particle admitted they had misinterpreted the data.

But researchers are still hopeful and morale remains high, says Sinervo.

Sinervo in the Atlas control room where scientists monitor proton collisions (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville).

“We’re trying to do things every day that nobody has ever done before,” he says.

Engineering a microchip to work for 10 years without the need for repair, as his student Cormier is doing, is no small feat, he adds. “That’s like how you build spaceships for a moonshot.

“We know that there is going to be some discovery over the horizon,” Sinervo says. “How far do we have to go to reach it? That’s something we don’t know.”