McGill students brace for subatomic collisions

University offers students rare opportunity to work with Large Hadron Collider

On March 30, 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin colliding subatomic particles at previously unattainable energies, and McGill students will be onsite eagerly awaiting the results. The LHC tests will open a new era of discovery about the basic nature of the Universe, and McGill faculty, post-doctorates and graduate students are on-site in Switzerland making important contributions to the research.

Miika Klemetti, a Ph.D. candidate, is relying on data from the LHC's ATLAS Experiment to write his thesis. He's directly involved in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle." Finding the particle would confirm a generally accepted theory known as the "standard model" that explains fundamental physics governing the Universe. Klemetti, however, is studying the possibility that the standard model could be wrong, that there could be more than one kind of Higgs boson. With only a few months worth of data, he could potentially find the proof of what would be, without exaggeration, the most important discovery in particle physics in more than 30 years.

"It sounds cheesy, but being part of a large international collaboration has been an eye-widening experience. It has been encouraging to see our own work making a noticeable difference, and with the guidance of the professors at McGill, many of the McGill students are already recognized experts at CERN," Klemetti said.

His remarks are echoed by colleague Marc-André Dufour, a 4th year PhD student in experimental particle physics. "As part of our training at McGill, we're expected to spend about a year physically at CERN, in Switzerland, and it's probably been the most stimulating and exciting time of my life." Using software and hardware to filter the collisions is a key part of the ATLAS project, and Dufour has developed a key piece of software that estimates how many collisions should be recorded per second for specific sets of criteria.

Working closely with researchers from other Canadian universities as well as from around the world, the McGill team currently consists of four faculty members, seven graduate students, four post-doctorates, and a few undergraduates who will participate over the summer.

Whether the LHC discovers Higgs Bosons or something beyond even the scientists' imagination, our understanding of the universe promises to advance in a breathtakingly large step, and McGill will be right there at the forefront.

On the Web:

CERN Press centre: Photos, video and latest information at http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics

LHC progress on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/cern

Canadian involvement in the LHC and ATLAS at http://www.atlas-canada.ca

McGill particle research at http://www.hep.physics.mcgill.ca/XHEP/web/

Photograph: Michael Hoch
(From the CERN PhotoLab)