| (back row, left to right) Kamal Benslama, Katherine Bergman and Randy Lewis are excited about ATLAS and the possibilities it holds for the U of R. PhD student Gia Khoriauli (bottom left) and post-doctoral fellow Meng Wang (bottom right) are two U of R researchers who will be working with data generated by ATLAS.
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For the past 15 years, about 2,000 scientists from 164 institutions in 35 countries have been gearing up for ATLAS, the largest experiment in the history of the physical sciences. And the U of R will have a seat at that exclusive table. More…
“ATLAS opens up a new and exciting era for the U of R,” says Dean of Science Katherine Bergman. “High Energy Physics tries to answer fundamental questions such as how the universe began and how it all fits together. The U of R is now an integral player in this project, and the potential is there for our researchers to be part of some truly important discoveries.”
The ATLAS experiment is based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland at CERN – the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The $9.5 billion LHC is located 100 metres underground in a 16-mile long circular tunnel which runs under the Franco-Swiss border.
Data collection will begin this summer. As a project collaborator, the University of Regina, under the direction of physics professor Kamal Benslama, is one of only 11 Canadian universities that will have access to the data.
| U of R researchers could have a hand in determining fundamental questions about the origin of the universe when they participate in ATLAS, the largest experiment in the physical sciences ever undertaken.
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Inside the LHC tunnel, two particle beams will be accelerated to extremely high energies, and then crashed into each other forty million times per second. The resulting conditions will correspond to those which existed approximately 1/10,000,000,000 of a second after the “Big Bang,” when the temperature was 1,000,000,000,000,000 degrees Celsius. The 7,000 tonne ATLAS detector will electronically register these conditions, allowing physicists to analyze the reactions that created them.
According to Randy Lewis, head of the U of R physics department, the significance of the project and how it will change the view of particle physics cannot be overstated.
“I have a dozen books on my shelf about the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and I expect that all of them will need to be rewritten as ATLAS explores the frontier of elementary particles. Through the work of Benslama and his team, vital pieces of this revolution are happening right here at the U of R,” Lewis says.
On March 15 University of Regina officials met with members of the CERN team in Switzerland to discuss the U of R’s commitment to the project. The delegation, which included Katherine Bergman, Vice-President (Research and International) David Gauthier, Kamal Benslama and Randy Lewis, met with the CERN research director and toured the ATLAS experiment site.
For more information visit: http://www.phys.uregina.ca/research/hep
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