To Smash the Subatomic

Transcript

Physicists are set to reveal the underlying properties of the universe using a giant new supercollider. From the University of Kansas, this is Research Matters. I’m Brendan Lynch.

It’s the largest scientific instrument ever built. And thanks to a National Science Foundation award, students and faculty from the University of Kansas will be on hand this summer when the Large Hadron Collider begins operation in Europe. Alice Bean, KU professor of physics and astronomy, has helped to develop critical components OF the new particle accelerator.

Alice Bean: It’s a 27-mile in circumference tunnel that has magnets in it that are going to accelerate protons on protons at the highest energies in the world. How energy works is what we’re trying to figure out. If you think about the Big Bang theory, there was a lot of energy in the universe and we’ve been cooling ever since.

Bean says research at the supercollider relies on Einstein’s IDEA that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing.

Alice Bean: If you put more energy you can make more mass. So part of what we’re trying to do is create that energy and then we can create particles with that mass. When you collide protons together, you can get that mass together. And you can see what happened at that time in the universe.

KU researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider will be poised at the vanguard of physics. Bean says breakthroughs might someday change life for millions of people, much like the discovery of the electron and development of the Internet.

Alice Bean: This is at the forefront of research where were tying to understand ‘how is matter made?’ and ‘what is mass?’ You hear ‘Oh you have more mass because you have more stuff.’ But we have particles that have a lot of mass that are very, very tiny. And we don’t understand how that can be so. If we can understand that, maybe we can do stuff like in the old ‘Star Trek.’ You know, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ We can change our mass and put it different places. That’s science fiction right now. But in order to get there, you need to understand how these things work.

For more about the Large Hadron Collider, log onto Research Matters dot K-U dot E-D-U. For the University of Kansas, I’m Brendan Lynch.

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