In a quest to solve the mysteries of the universe, scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will join an international contingent of thousands of physicists.
The program is known as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), an international particle physics project to be conducted near Geneva, Switzerland.
The university announced earlier this month it received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to spend on preparation for the project, which will in part examine particle interaction.
A total of 12 students, faculty and staff members from the physics, computer science and engineering departments will collaborate on the project.
The university was chosen as one of the six computing facilities in the United States that will compute and analyze a fraction of the data gathered during the project’s launch in 2007.
Ken Bloom, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, said it would take time to build the infrastructure and communication networks required for the project.
Bloom, who is the project manager for the sixcomputing facilities in the country, said a massive amount of data would be analyzed between computers worldwide.
That analyzing requires new software and an advanced computing network that is still being built.
“In 2007, our goal is to have three times the computer capacity and 10 times the disk capacity for the project,” Bloom said.
The university has already purchased 64 individual computers with four processors and 20 terabytes of hard disk to facilitate the massive amount of data to be analyzed, he said.
A terabyte is equal to about 1 trillion bytes.
A more than 16-mile underground tunnel in Switzerland will propel protons to collide at the speed of light, Bloom said.
That collision would re-create massive particles that only existed for seconds at the beginning of the universe, he said.
“On a small scale, we’re trying to recreate how the universe was at its earliest moments,” Bloom said.
Bloom said if scientists can understand how the universe was in the beginning, they could understand how it got to be what it is now.
Aaron Dominguez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, said particle physics is trying to answer two questions: What is the world made of, and what are the rules of interaction between particles?
Dominguez said he believed discoveries in this project could solve the mystery of particle interaction and reveal the theorized Higgs particle, a fifth force.
Currently, only four forces exist in physics: Gravity,electricity, magnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces.
Dominguez said he believes the Higgs particle, named after scientist Peter Higgs, could be responsible for giving particles their mass.
Dominguez said that in looking for new forms of matter and the discovery of a new force, they are trying to answer questions that could not be answered before.
“Our hope is to change the way we view the universe,” he said.
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