UW scientists join hunt for 'God' particle to complete 'theory of everything'

When the world's most powerful subatomic particle collider begins gathering data this summer, it will be a major milestone for a number of University of Washington scientists.

The UW, led by professors Henry Lubatti in physics and Colin Daly in mechanical engineering, played a central role in designing and fabricating nearly 90,000 tubes that are key to the workings of the Atlas detector. Atlast is one of six particle physics experiments that are part of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

Physicists the world over are hoping that Atlas will help unlock some deep scientific mysteries and perhaps even lead to discovery of the Higgs boson, sometimes called "the God particle" because it is believed its discovery will refine the understanding of exactly how the universe came to be and how it functions, and how mass came to be in the first place.

UW researchers are primarily involved with an Atlas subsystem that detects subatomic particles called muons. These particles have little interaction with each other or with other matter and are formed as a byproduct of the collisions between protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. The collider will provide far too much data for scientists to log all of it, so the first appearance of muons can be a signal that scientists need to record information on collisions taking place at that time.

"They are like little messengers that tell us a potentially interesting event may have occurred, a signal that we should look more closely at that event," Lubatti said.

Potentially that could lead to direct evidence of the elusive Higgs boson.

"That's just one example of the detector's value," Lubatti added. "There are many other interactions that produce high-energy muons, so it is very important to be able to observe these."

The scientists are looking for other information that will help them to fill gaps in what they call the Standard Model of particle physics, a framework that explains the fundamental forces of nature. The Standard Model explains the way particle interactions create the strong nuclear force, the electroweak force and electromagnetism, and how those forces work with each other, but aspects of those interactions still are not well understood. The Large Hadron Collider also could lead to better understanding of the fourth fundamental force – gravity – in terms of particle interactions, and help solve the puzzle of why gravity, while perhaps most recognizable to a lay observer, is the weakest of the fundamental forces.

The collider is a successor of sorts to the Superconducting Supercollider, a high-energy collider that was to have been built in Texas. The supercollider was first proposed in 1983 and construction began in 1991, but escalating cost estimates and other factors created controversy and Congress cancelled the project in 1993, after about $2 billion had been spent.