MSU takes part in big bang research

Billions of years after it created the universe, the cataclysmic event known as the big bang might be making another appearance in 2010.

This time, however, MSU researchers will have a front-row seat as particles of cosmic makeup smash together in a more local setting: the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland.

More than a year after a malfunction between two gigantic magnets crippled the LHC, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the accelerator roared back to life a week ago.

The LHC will continue to gain momentum in the coming weeks as a team of MSU engineers, professors and graduate students await information from the collider, which is designed to recreate conditions similar to those immediately following the big bang.

“So far, the LHC team has surprised the (experimenters) by how far they got in just the few days since we started again,” wrote Reiner Hauser, an MSU research professor currently stationed at CERN, in an e-mail. “Overall, there is quite some excitement that this time we will actually run as planned and take some data.”

MSU’s main role at CERN concerns ATLAS, a 7,700-ton detector, which will collect a large amount of data to be sorted through and transmitted to various universities and institutions across the globe.

Although the collider is back up and running, MSU physics professor Joey Huston said it will be a while before substantial data is gathered and potentially never-before-seen physics occur.

Huston, a member of MSU’s ATLAS Group, said the LHC initially will operate at energy levels that are fractions of its full potential. After last year’s complications, Huston said the collider’s operators are biding their time and gradually will increase energy output to avoid another malfunction.

Huston said operators were able to ramp up one of the collider’s two energy beams to 1.118 trillion electron volts, or TeVs, Sunday.

He said the LHC likely will surpass its sister collider, the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., in energy output before the year’s end, when the LHC will be shut down for several weeks for a holiday break. Additionally, researchers hope to increase the energy to 3.5 TeVs per beam by early 2010, half of the collider’s 14 TeV capacity.

“Things are working well now, but they’re going to take it very slowly,” Huston said. “It’s going to be a little larger than the Tevatron, but … it’s going to be a long time to catch up.”

MSU physics professor Bernard Pope said although it will be about a year before the LHC produces noteworthy results, the current, small steps are setting the collider up for new discoveries.

“We’re studying events as they happen as best we can,” Pope said. “We don’t expect major scientific breakthroughs soon, but it looks as though it’s laying the foundations for some interesting stuff in the next year.”