Rice professor Paul Padley stands in front of a small piece of the CMS project that he and other Rice faculty and students have worked on at the LHC in Switzerland.
When I was a student, I was taught that the universe began with the “Big Bang” and was expanding — but the expansion was slowing because of gravity. An important question was whether gravity would cause the universe to collapse back in on itself, or not.
Scientists were hoping to resolve that question with the Hubble Space Telescope. What they found was completely unexpected: The expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but speeding up. The accelerating expansion of the universe is now one of the greatest mysteries in science, and it took a phenomenal facility such as the Hubble Space Telescope to make this amazing discovery possible.
The Hubble telescope exemplifies a basic truth in science: To make great scientific discoveries, it is important to build great experiments. In order to advance our understanding of nature even further, scientists from around the world have collaborated to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive $6 billion particle collider located outside Geneva, Switzerland. In a 17-mile-long tunnel 328 feet underground, scientists are smashing subatomic particles (or hadrons) into each other to create conditions similar to those evident at the birth of the universe. The resulting data could reveal key insights into the makeup of matter in the moments after the Big Bang. Recently this facility began creating the highest energy collisions ever seen in a laboratory, getting closer to creating the conditions of the Big Bang than ever before.
Faculty and students from Rice University, among other universities enlisted worldwide, have worked for more than 15 years to bring this project to fruition and will be analyzing the data it produces to advance our understanding of the universe.
Over the years, dozens of Rice students have contributed to this project. Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karl Ecklund, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jabus Roberts, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Frank Geurts, and I are currently involved in the program, along with an electrical engineer, three postdoctoral fellows and two graduate students. Our tradition of engaging Rice students in the project will continue this summer when five Rice students to travel to Switzerland to help take and analyze data from the LHC experiment.
This ambitious project had to overcome tremendous technological hurdles before scientists ever turned it on. For example, Rice has played a key role in the development of the electronic systems for the CMS experiment at the LHC, which selects what data to store for future analysis. This experiment can produce data at 40 terabytes per second. A team of engineers, postdocs and students from Rice built and maintains electronics that mine this data in real time, flagging events that should be saved for future analysis.
So even before we have made any scientific discoveries, we have advanced technology and introduced a whole generation of Rice students to that technology. In the end, large-scale scientific endeavors advance our understanding of nature and engage students around the world (including here at Rice) in the creation of new technology and a new understanding of nature.
Paul Padley, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, is a guest blogger for the Baker Institute Science and Technology Program. This week, he is at the CERN in Switzerland working on the Large Hadron Collider project. His involvement in the CMS experiment includes overseeing scientific operations related to Rice’s participation in the effort.