In search of the 'God particle'

The universe's most elusive morsel of matter may soon be within Brad Cox's grasp.

Since the 1960s, physicists like Cox have sought to detect a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson - often referred to as the "God particle" - that is thought to be the origin of all mass.

Cox, a University of Virginia physics professor, is the principal investigator of UVa's high-energy physics group, which is part of an international research project that may soon yield evidence of the God particle, dark matter, extra dimensions beyond time and space, micro black holes and other as-yet hypothetical phenomena.

"We're on the threshold of a paradigm shift in the field of physics," Cox said. "For practical purposes, this kind of project is on the level of going to the moon."

Cox's team is helping to build the massive Compact Muon Solenoid Detector, which is being installed at a mind-bogglingly giant particle accelerator currently under construction at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva.

The $3.2 billion Large Hadron Collider, expected to be completed in May, is buried deep underground inside a tunnel that is 16.7 miles in circumference. In the works since 1994, the Large Hadron Collider will be seven times more powerful than the world's strongest existing particle accelerator.

"That's like having a telescope that can see seven times farther into the universe," said Kenneth McFarlane, a physicist at Hampton University who has been working on the project since 1996. "It's like the difference between the Hubble and a ground-based telescope. Any time you have a chance to see farther, you have a chance to see things you've never seen before."

Inside the circular tunnel, thousands of superconducting magnets cryogenically cooled to just under absolute zero will bend and circulate beams comprised of billions of protons. The machine will accelerate these beams to 99.999 percent of the speed of light and smash them into one another.

As the beams collide, the resulting impact of subatomic particles can mimic the conditions that supposedly occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Four $800 million detectors - including the 12,500-ton Compact Muon Solenoid Detector - will allow researchers to map out results of the proton beam collisions.

"Ours is a small detector," said Cox, sitting in his office inside UVa's high-energy physics lab atop Observatory Hill. "It's roughly the size of this building."

When the Large Hadron Collider begins to produce results in mid-2008, researchers like Cox and his colleagues will receive vast quantities of data for analysis. The collider will be capable of causing up to 800 million collisions per second, well beyond normal computing power.

To handle the reams of information, the researchers will transfer the data over next-generation technologies, such as the Internet2 Network, a much faster version of the Internet that is currently only available to research institutions.

"The amount of data that will be produced is just enormous," Cox said. "It's simply vomiting.

In addition to the UVa research team, the Large Hadron Collider project includes 600 other physicists at 60 U.S. universities and institutions, 19 European nations and research groups in Brazil, China, Japan and elsewhere.

"I've been working at this for 40 years and I still have trouble wrapping my head around the scope of it," Cox said. "It's huge."

The UVa team's work has been financed in part by $600,000 in congressional earmarks sponsored by U.S. Sen. John W. Warner and other Virginia lawmakers. The Large Hadron Collider is funded primarily by the European Union, which paid $3 billion, with the United States chipping in another $500 million.

For Sergio Conetti, another researcher with UVa's high-energy physics group, the Large Hadron Collider's most interesting possibility is that it could reveal something completely unexpected.

"It's quite exciting because we're all expecting something new to happen," said Conetti, an Italian physicist who helped found the department at UVa in the late-1980s. "Who knows what we'll find-"

The field of particle physics, Conetti said, is like a house without a roof. Though theories suggest what ought to occur in high-energy proton collisions, physicists lacked sufficient technology to test the hypotheses. Theories are never complete, he said, until proven either true or false.

The Large Hadron Collider, the UVa physicists hope, will prove or disprove the existence of the God particle. The Higgs boson is the last undiscovered piece of the "standard model" of physics, a theory scientists believe explains the building blocks of the universe.

But the UVa researchers anticipate that the project may go beyond the standard model and foster discoveries such as supersymmetric particles, which may be the universe's dark matter that has been theorized by astronomers.

The project may also reveal the existence of dimensions beyond the four of space and time, Cox said. Theories such as the Randall-Sundrum model, proposed in 1999, hold that five, six, seven or more dimensions may exist outside of our own.

It may also create tiny black holes, Cox said. By impacting energy at high speeds, researchers may be able to observe a gravitational collapse for a short period of time, he said.

"There are all these theories about what should be out there and what should happen," Cox said. "What would be most exiting is if all those theories were wrong. We're going to find out about a lot of things that we've all wondered about for a long time."

Yet the Large Hadron Collider may produce results that go further than the gee-whiz factor. Researchers expect its discoveries may also have practical purposes for government and business.

The superconducting technology it employs, Cox said, could be applied to create more efficient power grids, lightning-quick information transfers and much more.

For researchers like Cox, however, the project is first and foremost an "intellectual rush."

"It's a thrill," he said. "We're going to understand a deeper level of the onion. This is big stuff."

McFarlane, of Hampton University, agreed. Physicists around the globe, he said, are eagerly anticipating the day in 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider is fired up.

"It's like you've been working on a satellite for years," he said. "And now it's finally going to be launched into space."