Studying the Beginning of Creation

Studying the beginning of creation
University of Texas at Arlington

By: Ken Ingle Freelance writer


In July of this year, 13 years of effort at the University of Texas at Arlington will pay off. In Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), more commonly know as CERN, will accelerate the first protons to within one billionth of the speed of light.
UTA, as at a number of universities, is busy finalizing work that it is hoped will result in a mini "big bang" at the largest and most powerful proton collider ever built. When the giant machine at CERN accelerates its first protons, they’ll be looking for particles that existed only at the first instant of time.
The project is so big that no one group can undertake it. The LHC, is intended to look at the very beginning of the universe, a fraction of a second after the big bang. The machine will accelerate a stream of protons, traveling in opposite directions, each with energy seven thousand times their original mass, to a collision. If all goes well, great science will be realized.
The University of Texas at Arlington has brought the attention of physicists across the nation to North Texas. UTA scientists Drs. Kaushik De and Andrew White didn’t quit when the supercollider being built at Waxahachie was shut down. They had joined UTA to be a part of this new science and were committed to succeeding. For the last 10 or more years, De and White have worked on the Atlas project, the heart of the CERN accelerator. UTA built a 50-ton component integral to Atlas. De and White are professors of experimental physics at UTA. De’s prior position was with the University of Michigan and White from the University of Florida, Gainesville.
De and White are part of a group known as HEP, High Energy Physics. Included in this group of scientist are Andrew Brandt, Amir Farbin, Jae Yu, a number of research professors, post doctorate members and several graduate students, around a total of 17 experimental physicists. In addition, two theoretical physicists, Drs John Fry, formerly of LSU, and Zdzislaw Musielak, MIT and NASA, both with over 10 years at UTA, are working on fundamental problems of particle physics that are relevant to the experiments to be performed at CERN.
How will the scientists know what happens at the instant the proton’s collide? That’s where De and White earn their money. Twelve of the 17 people actively engaged in this project for the last few years have been busy writing computer programs to collect and collated the immense amount of data that will be generated when the protons finally smash head on. Images of particles radiated or torn from the colliding protons are captured by millions of pixels and transcribed into something the computer can understand. Fifty supercomputers scattered around the world will process the information. De and White, along with counterparts at each computer center, begin the job of collating the results to see if they’ve captured a picture of the universe’s beginning.
This is a massive chore. And it has to be done right or the experiment and resulting data are useless. That’s where the collective efforts of the UTA computer programmers pay off.
What about the science, what do they expect to find? What will it tell us? Existing colliders have given us names like Fermions, Leptons, and Quarks. So, what should we expect from the big CERN accelerator? The HIGGS BOSON. Sound impressive? Probably not. But to the scientists it means a great deal. Once identified, the Higgs Boson should contribute to the explanation of all mass in the universe.
Not enough for you? It will also contribute to the understanding of a unified field theory, or more plainly, how the universe was at the beginning, the holy grail of the scientific community. That’s what the CERN project is design to shed light on. The work of the UTA scientists is crucial to gaining this understanding.
How does it affect our lives? Dr. De says, "While it may be some time before the results of their mini big bang are known, we can find some comfort in the knowledge that sixty percent of GDP can be traced to Modern physics."
If the scientists are right with this one, it could lead to untold advances for human kind.But it doesn’t stop there. White is already looking forward to the next level in particle research. And that’s a linear collider. It’s called the linac. And UTA is poised to be a major player in this research as well.
And there may be more. The data transmission system utilized by CERN is called PanDA could well be the next internet. PanDa was originally proposed by UTA's. Dr. Kaushik De.