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by Maria Lironi
University of Victoria researchers are playing a critical part in the biggest science experiment in history, currently underway in Switzerland.
Since 1992, UVic physicist Michel Lefebvre has been instrumental in organizing Canada’s participation in the ATLAS project, the particle detector component of a massive new proton collider facility being built by the world-famous Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN.
In addition, Lefebvre led a $4.2-million project to design and build a key part of the ATLAS detector. ATLAS-Canada now consists of 80 scientists from 10 institutions, including UVic.
Data produced by the ATLAS project at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be filtered, analysed and stored at the new Vancouver-based ATLAS Data Centre, which received $10.5 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) last month.
The LHC will be the most powerful and sophisticated particle accelerator in the world, capable of reproducing Big Bang-like conditions by smashing particles together that have been accelerated to velocities just shy of the speed of light.
A central part of the LHC facility will be the ATLAS detector, an instrument engineered to measure the after-effects of those collisions—
information that will allow physicists to study nature at its most fundamental level.
“ATLAS will give us a chance to examine the most fundamental building blocks of nature in the most fundamental of ways,” says Lefebvre. “For a scientist to try and extract the secrets of nature in this way is very exciting, especially since it’s so intimately connected to the beginnings of the universe.”
The ATLAS Data Centre will be housed at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver. TRIUMF is owned and operated by a consortium of Canadian universities, including UVic.
Installation will begin this summer, with full-scale testing slated to begin in the early fall. For more information about the ATLAS project at UVic, visit particle.phys.uvic.ca/~web-atlas/.
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