Michael Murray, associate professor of physics at Kansas University, talks with Jessica Snyder, a fifth-year senior from Clearwater. Murray and Snyder are involved with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, as are several other KU professors and students.

Four Kansas University professors and several students and researchers have their hands in the largest physics experiment in generations.

International scientists completed the first major phase of the Large Hadron Collider this month near Geneva, Switzerland. The project is meant to smash particles to possibly open up research about the creation of the universe.

But there’s still plenty of work to be done.

“We know our experiment is working. We are very pleased. It’s an enormous relief to finally have the accelerator working,” said KU associate physics professor Michael Murray. “Now we just start worrying about how we’re going to look at the data.”

Murray and Stephen Sanders, a KU physics professor and department chairman, are working on the nuclear physics side of the project. Professors Alice Bean and Phil Baringer are leading KU researchers in particle physics.

Physicists around the world are joining them. The supercollider project involves a 17-mile-long underground tunnel in a ring shape. Physicists designed it to allow them to fire two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons in opposite directions so they collide.

The hope is that protons in the beam will shatter to allow more research on the makeup of matter and the universe.

On Sept. 11, the project received international attention when the two beams passed each other in the same area of the tunnel. Scientists are hoping they will collide soon, but a transformer also malfunctioned, hindering the operation. A subsequent failure announced Saturday will take at least two months to repair.

Experts have said the equipment failures were not unexpected for such a large-scale project.

KU researchers are working on a piece of the collider called the Compact Muon Solenoid to help track the particles after a collision. About one-third of scientists on the CMS project are American.

A comeback for physics

Atom smashing is back in national news years after President Reagan pushed heavily for a collider to be built in the United States in the 1980s. That project was known as the superconducting supercollider, or SSC.

The federal government’s involvement tipped off a huge interest from more than 25 states. Because magnets were weaker, that project would have required much more land than the LHC’s site today near the French-Swiss border.

News reports originally listed the cost for the superconducting supercollider at $4.4 billion, but in the 1990s, estimates had ballooned as high as $15 billion.

Kansas leaders proposed a site about 20 miles south of Topeka, but the Department of Energy picked a site in Ellis County, Texas, south of Dallas.

Several KU and Kansas State University researchers were involved with the Texas research, including Baringer, who came to KU in 1988. KU even received money from the state of Texas to hire two new particle physicists.

“We were building a sizable group,” Baringer said.

But as cost estimates for the SSC increased in the early 1990s, support in Congress dwindled. Congress killed the project in 1994.

Adrian Melott, a KU physics and astronomy professor, said the way things ended with the SSC seemed to start a trend for less U.S. support and funding for science.

KU researchers and Americans do have a hand in the LHC, he said, but most of the benefits will go somewhere else.

“That’s not the same. The cultural invigoration and the benefits are going to occur much more to Europe than to America,” Melott said.

Murray said the cancellation of the collider in Texas was a “real disaster for particle physics in the U.S.” But he thinks the LHC project will help “put things on the right track.”

“The U.S. contribution is absolutely vital, not just materially, but intellectually,” he said.

Going forward

Although Europe is the focus of most of the action for the LHC, undergraduate physics students at KU have been busy for several years preparing equipment. Murray and Bean made trips to Europe over the summer, and several KU undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are either there now or went earlier to help.

“It’s really the young people who really reap the benefits. Because us old fogies, we’re more for the guiding,” Murray said.

Jessica Snyder, a fifth-year senior from Clearwater, helped assemble a Zero Degree Calorimeter under Murray’s leadership. It’s meant to help monitor collisions in the supercollider that will occur about 40 million times per second.

“It’s pretty cool, even as an undergrad, to be involved in this large of a project and to be exposed to all of the people in the field,” Snyder said.

Murray said as the project moves further along, it will allow physicists to eliminate bad theories as they look into big questions like the formation of matter. Scientists and designers still have plenty of work to do not only to get the beams to collide but also to analyze the new data that will come their way.

“It’s kind of like a finely tuned musical instrument,” Murray said. “You really have to learn all its quirks.”