Issue date: 4/7/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: brown.edu Physics professors Greg Landsberg and Meenakshi Narain will analyze data that could illuminate the foundation of the universe.

This summer, as the global physics community holds its breath in anticipation, three Brown physics professors will play an integral role in the most ambitious experiment in history.

By racing tiny particles around a track nearly 250 football fields long - and colliding them at just under the speed of light ­- scientists are hoping to find the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, an as yet unobserved particle only theorized to exist. The experiment promises to shed light on the very foundation of the universe.

Physics professors David Cutts, Greg Landsberg and Meenakshi Narain will be some of the first to analyze the data from the Large Hadron Collider, an $8.7-billion particle accelerator on the France-Switzerland border that will be completed this summer. In preparation, they are constructing different components of a detector that will look for traces of the Higgs boson, an unstable particle predicted by the 1960s work of, among others, a current Brown physicist.

The Standard Model is a widely accepted theory of how the universe's smallest particles interact with one another. The existence of the Higgs boson is predicted by and necessary for the model, but has not yet been proven experimentally. Confirmation will answer the question of what mass is and where it comes from.

This is "physics at a very fundamental level," said Professor of Physics Chung-I Tan, who chairs the department. He said the experiment "tests the very foundation of modern physics."

Cutts said the research is exciting "because it provides a way to get close to the fundamental question of nature" and "recreate an early time."

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which is part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, collides protons at just under the speed of light to create conditions similar to those less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the explosion believed to have created the universe. These collisions create new, unstable particles that decay into other particles called hadrons and muons. Layers of specific detectors that encircle the collider record these particles' signatures, which scientists use to infer what unstable particles were formed in the collision. It's a bit like arriving at the scene of a car crash and determining what car was in the accident by re-assembling its parts, Narain said.

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