Large Hadron Collider ready to fire up...
I seem to recall a discussion on here regarding the LHC at CERN and the Atlas experiment in particular—looks like the wait is over.
World's largest particle accelerator fires up
U of T physicists part of international team
By Kim Luke, posted Wednesday, September 3, 2008
On Sept. 10, an international team of scientists that includes members from U of T's Department of Physics will fire up a machine that they believe will answer some fundamental questions about the structure of the universe.
The highly anticipated $8-billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located under ground at the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator as well as the most complex science experiment ever developed. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, developed 30 years ago, which still provides the theoretical picture for particle physics.
"The Standard Model has allowed us to understand the behaviour of the minute particles that make up matter," said Professor Robert Orr of physics. The predictions of the model have held up well to experimental scrutiny so far. However, the Standard Model only makes sense if a particle called the Higgs Boson exists. The Higgs has proven elusive to physicists but is essential to the model because it explains why other particles exhibit the mass they do. The LHC may also reveal the solution to the puzzle of the mysterious dark matter which dominates the universe, Orr added.
"Given that the Higgs has not been seen at lower energy accelerators, we are pretty confident that the LHC is the first particle accelerator that is powerful enough to reveal the Higgs particle," he said.
The LHC project involves some 8,000 physicists from over 85 countries and hundreds of universities and laboratories. U of T's role is focused on a sophisticated experiment known as ATLAS (A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS). The 7,000-tonne assembly, parts of which were built at U of T, tracks and measures the energy of particles emerging from the proton collisions in the LHC: particles that could be fragments of the elusive Higgs Boson. The ATLAS project involves 2,200 physicists from 37 countries worldwide. In addition to Orr, who is the Toronto team leader, members of the U of T team include David Bailey, Peter Krieger, Pekka Sinervo, Pierre Savard, Richard Teuscher and William Trischuk.
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