{"id":1428,"date":"2015-06-15T16:42:03","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T20:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=1428"},"modified":"2025-10-17T17:36:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T21:36:14","slug":"atlas-roars-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/atlas-roars-back-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"ATLAS Roars Back to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n ATLAS Roars Back to Life\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

As the enormous particle accelerator just outside Geneva, Switzerland, came back to life this month after a planned two-year shutdown, Carleton University physicist Manuella Vincter was spending a few shifts in the control room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is buried in a circular tunnel with a 27-kilometre circumference and famously confirmed the existence of the missing-link Higgs boson particle in its first round of research, is now nearly twice as powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vincter isn\u2019t sure what will happen – which makes the world\u2019s biggest science experiment even more exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a breakthrough five decades in the making, completed the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, a set of basic particles and interactions that describes the fundamental structure of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cWe knew where to look, and we saw it,\u201d says Vincter. \u201cIf the Standard Model is correct, we don\u2019t really know what we will see next. We\u2019re going into the era of New Physics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vincter is part of a Carleton contingent of four professors, three postdoctoral students and about a half-dozen graduate students who focus on ATLAS, a multinational detector project at the LHC with significant Canadian contributions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has spent the past year at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility in Switzerland, analyzing data from the first three years of smashing protons together at extremely high speeds, and getting ready for uncharted territory as upgrades increase the energy the LHC can produce from three to 13 tera-electron volts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new experiments, which recently began after a couple hours of successful test collisions in late May, could reveal more Higgs bosons or other exotic particles, says Vincter. They may confirm the existence of dark matter \u2014 matter that exerts a gravitational pull but cannot be seen \u2014 or elucidate the supersymmetry theory, which suggests that every known particle has a mirror particle that can only be observed at a very high energy. Black holes and alternative dimensions, phenomena typically associated with science fiction, are also legitimate considerations at CERN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are so many possibilities,\u201d says Vincter, explaining that when trains of protons collide at high speeds at the LHC, the resulting surge of energy can hold evidence of new particles. Researchers can\u2019t see these particles, which are very short lived, but the data collected by detectors such as ATLAS \u2014 a continuous stream of ones and zeros that algorithms convert into representations of electrons and other \u201cphysics objects\u201d \u2014 can be conclusively interpreted. \u201cWe know there\u2019s dark matter out there in the universe,\u201d says Vincter. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what it is. We don\u2019t know if we\u2019ll see it at the LHC. But we could, and that gives me hope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly 3,000 scientists work on ATLAS alone, teams of roughly 10 to 30 people grouped around common research interests. Everybody has free access to all data generated, part of an unprecedented international collaboration that has attracted sociologists who study human dynamics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Canada, in addition to developing software and analyzing data, Carleton has played a key role by constructing hardware for ATLAS in tandem with other universities. Led by Physics Department Chair Gerald Oakham, who has spent much of his career searching for the Higgs boson, components for the first phase of research were built on campus at the Herzberg Laboratories. Now the race is on to build new components in time for installation during the next scheduled shutdown in 2018. These upgrades will help ATLAS select \u201cinteresting\u201d events to scrutinize from the huge volume of data generated by the LHC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work will begin at TRIUMF, Canada\u2019s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, on the University of British Columbia campus. After contributions from Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, the units will be shipped to Carleton for assembly, and then onward to McGill for testing before being sent to Europe, where they will be attached to detectors made in China, Chile and Israel and mounted onto the New Muon Small Wheel, which will have a diameter of nine metres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a nice little bit of logistics,\u201d says Oakham, who is currently sourcing parts with colleagues from other countries. \u201cThese experiments are very large and complicated. Particle physicists have been doing this kind of thing for quite some time, and the collaborations keep getting bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada supported the acquisition of equipment and infrastructure to build the new detectors, and in late May the Canada Foundation for Innovation announced it is providing Carleton with an additional $6 million for work on ATLAS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond taking a stab at unlocking the secrets of the universe, one of the benefits of this project is that it allows students to participate in the construction of new hardware. \u201cThat\u2019s important for a university,\u201d says Oakham. \u201cOur job is to train people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

[wide-image url=”\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/atlas-1.jpg”]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carleton master\u2019s student Stephen Weber arrived at CERN just as the LHC was getting primed for round two. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of information to digest,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s overwhelming. CERN feels a lot like a university, and we all speak \u2018physics,\u2019 so it\u2019s not difficult to work with anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a chance, of course, that the next three years at CERN will yield no breakthroughs, just a lot of data. Vincter would be OK with that. She enjoys the precision and minutiae of data analysis. Although surprises are the most fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you buy a box of Cracker Jack, the popcorn is tasty, and you enjoy eating it,\u201d she says. \u201cBut what you really want is the treat that\u2019s somewhere inside the box.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the enormous particle accelerator just outside Geneva, Switzerland, came back to life this month after a planned two-year shutdown, Carleton University physicist Manuella Vincter was spending a few shifts in the control room. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is buried in a circular tunnel with a 27-kilometre circumference and famously confirmed the existence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[13,25],"cu_story_tag":[1919,1923,1925],"class_list":["post-1428","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","hentry","cu_story_type-research-discovery","cu_story_type-student-experience","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-science","cu_story_tag-graduate-studies","cu_story_tag-research"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98559,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/1428\/revisions\/98559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}