Congrats to the LHC!

Congratulations to the Large Hadron Collider scientists for achieving the first collisions in their mammoth machine! My favorite coverage of the collider’s warmup comes from the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture, which recently featured a couple of dozen screen-sized images of the LHC: check it out.

-Nick

Who’s afraid of the Superconducting Super Collider?

The site of the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider.

The Superconducting Super Collider is rarely discussed anymore, but its ghost has haunted high energy physics for the last 16 years. Slated to begin operations in 1999 in Waxahachie, Texas, the SSC would have been nearly three times as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Had it been completed, we would probably not be waiting with bated breath for the hints of the Higgs Boson from the LHC: the Higgs and a slew of other physics would most likely be among the recent accomplishments of jubilant experimental physicists.

Alas, after ten years of planning and $2 billion in construction costs, Congress pulled the plug on the project in 1993. Today, several of the buildings and 14 miles of the planned 54-mile-long tunnel sit abandoned in the Texas desert — the tunnel intentionally filled with water in order to preserve it. Despite talk of turning the site into a mushroom farm or a data center, the site hasn’t been used for much other than a filming location for Universal Soldier: The Return, which even we aren’t curious enough to watch.

But wondering about what’s actually there, Nick and I decided to search for its remains on our way from Chicago to Los Alamos.

Lizzie comes face to face with the greatest unrealized dream in American particle physics.

The Battleship in the Soudan Mine: MINOS Part II

The MINOS Far Detector, buried 2,341 feet beneath the earth in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota. A mural by Joseph Giannetti about the power of science is painted on the right wall.

After visiting the point of origin of the MINOS neutrinos on our Fermilab tour at the beginning of the trip, it seemed a fitting conclusion to stop by their destination as my own road neared its end. So with Lizzie in Mexico, I made the Summer’s last science-related stop at the Soudan Mine with my friend Sam on our way back across the country.

As discussed in our previous post, the MINOS experiment uses a beam of neutrinos called NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) produced by decaying protons from Fermilab’s Main Injector. These neutrinos travel 450 miles through the earth to the 2341-foot deep Soudan Mine in northeast Minnesota (and beyond, of course), where physicists can isolate the Far Detector from just about any interference. Despite the fact that the detector is shaped like an enormous stop sign, only a tiny number of neutrinos obey the symbolic request: of all the trillions of neutrinos produced by NuMI, the Far Detector sees only about one a day.

Courtesy of Fermilab.

Neutrinos and the Intensity Frontier: Fermilab Part II (& MINOS Part I)

The enormous hole in the MINOS building that leads down to the NuMI neutrino beamline and MINOS

In all the fuss about how amazing the LHC is going to be, we often forget that there are things it won’t be able to do. One of the most glaring holes in the LHC’s research program is how little work it plans to do on neutrino physics, one of the most exciting and promising fields in the quest to go beyond the Standard Model. Neutrinos are elementary particles that are nearly massless and have no charge. They rarely interact with other particles, so you need to make a lot of them to have the faintest hope of detecting just a few in experiments. In other words, you don’t need very high energy protons to produce neutrinos, but you do need a lot of lower energy ones.

It wouldn’t really make sense to devote much of the LHC’s particle yield to experiments that don’t need anything approaching its high energies, especially during the early years of the experiment. So Fermilab, somewhat presciently, is stepping in to fill the gap. As our tour guide and gracious host Kurt Riesselmann told us, “Fermilab is moving from the energy frontier to the intensity frontier” — meaning that instead of producing a small number of the highest possible energy particles, the lab is figuring out how to make as many lower energy particles as possible.

Robert Wilson’s Weird Dream Lab: Fermilab, part 1

Perhaps I’m biased, but Fermilab is one of my favorite places.  Not only is it home to the biggest kind of Big Science — the Tevatron — but it also manages to be the quirkiest of the National Labs. I went there for the first time as a science writing intern in the summer of 2005 and, as this trip should make clear, never really looked back.

A panorama showcasing Wilson's blue-and-orange color scheme and his self-designed π-shaped power poles stretching off into the distance.

Oak Ridge: Where Cyclotrons Still Roam

Lizzie staring into the exposed belly of the Recoil Mass Spectrometer

Initially, we didn’t think we’d have time to visit Oak Ridge – our planned route took us on a comparatively leisurely drive from New York to Chicago with a stop in Pittsburgh for a night. But as the recommendations began to pile up, first from John Haggerty and the other physicists at Brookhaven, then Cindy Kelly of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, we realized that the additional visit to Tennessee would probably be worth it.

Nuclear Tourism

The only stop on our tour that didn’t directly involve physics research was at the University of Chicago. Today, a statue and plaques sit above the exact spot where Enrico Fermi initiated the first controlled nuclear reaction in 1942 by pushing chunks of uranium into a pile of graphite – essentially the same process used by the Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge (which you can read about in the Old Headers section or in our upcoming post about the Lab).

While the plaques speak of the “tremendous scientific potential” tapped for the first time by Fermi’s experiment, Henry Moore’s sculpture more somberly combines the forms of a mushroom cloud and a human skull. By the mid 1960s, when the sculpture was commissioned, the terrible power of nuclear reactions had apparently become all too clear.

A closer look at RHIC

A panoramic view of the PHENIX detector's building and counting house. To the left, an entrance to RHIC's particle beam ring is visible. When access is required, the enormous concrete slabs that block the entrance are removed with a crane to expose the route into the tunnel.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven is a medium-to-high-energy machine that plays a unique role in the study of the early universe. While most particle accelerators collide single particles (like protons and antiprotons in the case Fermilab’s Tevatron), RHIC’s main purpose is to collide gold nuclei, each of which contains 79 protons.

Why the additional mass? The results of a proton-antiproton collision usually look something like this:

A proton-antiproton collision at the Tevatron (courtesy of Rockefeller University/CDF)

Gold ion collisions produce tracks like this:

A gold ion collision at RHIC (courtesy of RHIC, found on Wikipedia)

Physics finally cool enough for Rolling Stone

Coinciding conveniently with our trip, the new issue of Rolling Stone profiles Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary. (You can read a PDF here.) The Department of Energy is unquestionably a bureaucratic mess (exhibit A: the Superconducting Super Collider), and Chu says he is committed to supporting good science rather than playing politics — a refreshing change for the department, considering that one congressional science staffer told Jeff Goodell, the piece’s author, “In the past, the only qualification necessary to becoming secretary of energy was that you knew nothing about energy.”

The National Synchrotron Light Source

Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source, we would discover, is just that — a light source. And despite the differences in scale and the methods of production, it isn’t so different from the studio lights used by photographers. In each case, the way to get the best image is to shine a really bright light on the subject and take a picture of it. Indeed, the only respect in which the light source’s name can be misleading is that it does not confine itself to the visible light spectrum, but uses everything between infrared and x-rays.

A view of the workspaces surrounding the smaller ring at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source