Three hundred feet below France's surface, near the village of Cessy, what could be the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe lies waiting. Because of a technological failure, however, the Compact Muon Solenoid, a part of the Large Hadron Collider, won't be running any experiments until spring of next year.
The CMS is one of the experiments making an effort to explore particle physics, in which the answers to fundamental questions of the universe are being sought. It lies on the French side of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, that spans 27 kilometers in a large circle between France and Switzerland. The LHC is a massive particle accelerator attempting to replicate conditions similar to when the universe was formed.
An experiment this large is impossible to compute in one space. Instead, the complex data received from the LHC is distributed all around the world.
Ken Bloom, assistant professor of physics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, works with a supercomputer dubbed "Red" that accepts data from the LHC.
"Seven Tier 1 facilities reprocess the data and split it into sub samples," Bloom said. "Tier 2 ... involves making samples of the data available for physicists to get their hands on."
Red at UNL is a part of Tier 2.
The LHC's delay in early September was a disappointment, but Bloom said there was going to be a lot of work to do whether or not the LHC went online as scheduled.
"There's still plenty to do," he said. "On the software and computing side, we're making sure our analysis software is ready, and we will continue testing it. Locally, we're making sure we can keep (Red) up and running. We'll make good use of the time."
If anyone working on this international endeavor for science hadn't heard of Nebraska before, they have now. Besides having a Tier 2 data reception point for the LHC at UNL, an essential part to the CMS, the forward pixel detector was in part developed at the university as well.
Aaron Dominguez, deputy leader of the team that worked on the forward pixel detector, described the function of the piece native to the Midwest.
"Its job is to be the first measurement of the flight paths of the collisions of the protons," he said. "We then take the kinetic energy and convert that energy into other forms of matter. We're using that energy to probe the fundamental structure of the universe."
Dominguez spent four years working on the Forward Pixel Detector, and was in Europe when it was installed in the Large Hadron Collider.
Like Bloom, Dominguez said that the LHC's delay has turned into a time to continue experimenting with the components they've been working on.
"We're still testing (the Forward Pixel Detector). It's a constant work in progress," he said. "Just about everything we've done hasn't been done before. All of the detectors are essentially their own prototypes. Everything is custom designed."
The science of measuring flight paths of collisions of protons isn't a simple one. The people involved with the LHC are making use of this time to cover their bases and prepare, while looking forward to the projected online date in the spring of '09.
anthonytroester@dailynebraskan.com
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