Dr Ronan McNulty (UCD School of Physics) and Dr Tahar Kechadi (UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics), 100m underground, in the experimental pit of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator have successfully collided beams of protons at the highest energy levels ever seen. The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom smasher ever built, is up, running and producing results.The experiment is seen as a major breakthrough in efforts to understand the fundamental nature of the universe.
The huge collider uses powerful electromagnets to send twin beams of atomic particles, protons, spinning in opposite directions around the giant 27km underground ring. On command these proton beams, travelling at close to the speed of light, are allowed to cross, causing high-energy collisions that emit huge energies.
There are four sensitive detectors placed around the ring, and these record the smaller components kicked out by the collisions, measuring their energies and gleaning details about them. One detector, the LHCb, has significant Irish involvement. Parts of the device were built at University College Dublin before being installed at CERN in Switzerland. The UCD Particle Physics team on LHCb is led by Dr Ronan McNulty, UCD School of Physics. Three PhD students from the group, James Keaveney, Dermot Moran and Stephen Farry were present at CERN to see the first data being produced.
The collider’s importance does not just stem from the fact it can deliver collisions, rather it comes from the tremendous energies it can produce while doing so. These high energies mimic those which occurred at the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, so these experiments inform our understanding of the nature of the cosmos.
