Hundreds of students, faculty and townspeople gathered in the rotunda of Dallas Hall on Monday, Aug. 21 to view a projection of the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College and the SMU Physics Department. (Jeff McWhorter/SMU)
Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing
The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.
The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.
“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”
Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.
Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.
“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”
A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.
Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.
Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.
Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.
“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”
Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.
Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.
“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.
Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.
“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.
SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.
By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:
Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.
Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.
Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.
A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.
Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.
The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.
The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.
To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.
Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.
The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.
The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.
Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.
Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.
That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.
Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.
Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.
The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.
The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.
CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.
There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.
Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.
The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.
Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.
The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.
KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.
SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal
Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.
The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.
The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.
The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.
The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.
Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”
Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.
Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.
Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.
But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.
Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”
The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.
The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.
Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.
The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.
In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”
Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award
Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”
The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.
Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.
As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.
The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.
Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.
“No significant signs of new physics with the present data yet but it takes only one significant deviation in the data to change everything.” — Albert De Roeck, CERN
First collisions of protons at the world’s largest science experiment are expected to start the first or second week of June, according to a senior research scientist with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
“It will be about another six weeks to commission the machine, and many things can still happen on the way,” said physicist Albert De Roeck, a staff member at CERN and a professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and UC Davis, California. De Roeck is a leading scientist on CMS, one of the Large Hadron Collider’s key experiments.
The LHC in early April was restarted for its second three-year run after a two-year pause to upgrade the machine to operate at higher energies. At higher energy, physicists worldwide expect to see new discoveries about the laws that govern our natural universe.
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De Roeck made the comments Monday while speaking during an international meeting of more than 250 physicists from 30 countries on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
“There are no significant signs of new physics yet,” De Roeck said of the data from the first run, adding however that especially SUSY diehards — physicists who predict the existence of a unique new theory of space and time called SuperSymmetry — maintain hopes of seeing evidence soon of that theory.
De Roeck in fact has high expectations for the possibility of new discoveries that could change the current accepted theory of physical reality, the Standard Model.
“It will take only one significant deviation in the data to change everything,” De Roeck said. “The upgraded machine works. Now we have to get to the real operation for physics.”
“Unidentified Lying Object” not a problem — remains stable
But work remains to be done. One issue the accelerator physicists remain cautiously aware of, he said, is an “Unidentified Lying Object” in the beam pipe of the LHC’s 17-mile underground tunnel, a vacuum tube where proton beams collide and scatter particles that scientists then analyze for keys to unlock the mysteries of the Big Bang and the cosmos.
Because the proton beam is sensitive to the geometry of the environment and can be easily blocked, the beam pipe must be free of even the tiniest amount of debris. Even something as large as a nitrogen particle could disrupt the beam. Because the beam pipe is a sealed vacuum it’s impossible to know what the “object” is.
“The unidentified lying object turns out not to be a problem for the operation, it’s just something to keep an eye on,” De Roeck said. “It’s in the vacuum tube and it’s not a problem if it doesn’t move and remains stable.”
The world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider made headlines when its global collaboration of thousands of scientists in 2012 observed a new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson. After that, the collider was paused for the extensive upgrade. Much more powerful than before, as part of Run 2 physicists on the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments are analyzing new proton collision data to unravel the structure of the Higgs.
The Large Hadron Collider straddles the border between France and Switzerland. Its first run began in 2009, led by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, through an international consortium of thousands of scientists.
Particle discoveries unlock mysteries of cosmos, pave way for new technology
The workshop in Dallas, the “2015 International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering,” draws the world’s leading scientists each year to an international city for nuts and bolts talks that drive the world’s leading-edge physics experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Going into the second run, De Roeck said physicists will continue to look for anomalies, unexpected decay modes or couplings, multi-Higgs production, or larger decay rates than expected, among other things.
Particle discoveries by physicists resolve mysteries, such as questions surrounding Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and the earliest moments of the Big Bang. But particle discoveries also are ultimately applied to other fields to improve everyday life, such as medical technologies like MRIs and PET scans, which diagnose and treat cancer.
For example, proton therapy is the newest non-invasive, precision scalpel in the fight against cancer, with new centers opening all over the world.
Hosted by the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, the Dallas meeting of physicists began Monday, April 27, 2015, and runs through Friday, May 1, 2015.
The workshop is sponsored by SMU, U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, CERN, National Science Foundation, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, DESY national research center and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. — Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
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New launch of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is the most stringent test yet of our accepted theories of how subatomic particles work and interact.
Start up of the world’s largest science experiment is underway — with protons traveling in opposite directions at almost the speed of light in the deep underground tunnel called the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.
As protons collide, physicists will peer into the resulting particle showers for new discoveries about the universe, said Ryszard Stroynowski, a collaborator on one of the collider’s key experiments and a professor in the Department of Physics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
“The hoopla and enthusiastic articles generated by discovery of the Higgs boson two years ago left an impression among many people that we have succeeded, we are done, we understand everything,” said Stroynowski, who is the senior member of SMU’s Large Hadron Collider team. “The reality is far from this. The only thing that we have found is that Higgs exist and therefore the Higgs mechanism of generating the mass of fundamental particles is possible.”
There is much more to be learned during Run 2 of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful proton smasher in the world, includes the ATLAS detector, one of the LHC’s four particle detectors. (CERN)
“In a way we kicked a can down the road because we still do not have sufficient precision to know where to look for the really, really new physics that is suggested by astronomical observations,” he said. “The observed facts that are not explained by current theory are many.”
The LHC’s control room in Geneva on April 5 restarted the Large Hadron Collider. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the 17-mile LHC tunnel — big enough to ride a bicycle through — straddles the border between France and Switzerland.
Two years ago it made headlines worldwide when its global collaboration of thousands of scientists discovered the Higgs Boson fundamental particle.
The Large Hadron Collider’s first run began in 2009. In 2012 it was paused for an extensive upgrade.
The new upgraded and supercharged LHC restarts at almost twice the energy and higher intensity than it was operating at previously, so it will deliver much more data.
Data flowing from the ATLAS detector’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter — which measures the energies carried by particle interactions — is delivered via a data link computer chip developed by physicists at Southern Methodist University. (CERN)
“I think that in the LHC Run 2 we will sieve through more data than in all particle physics experiments in the world together for the past 50 years,” Stroynowski said. “Nature would be really strange if we do not find something new.”
SMU is active on the LHC’s ATLAS detector experiment Within the big LHC tunnel, gigantic particle detectors at four interaction points along the ring record the proton collisions that are generated when the beams collide.
In routine operation, protons make 11,245 laps of the LHC per second — producing up to 1 billion collisions per second. With that many collisions, each detector captures collision events 40 million times each second.
That’s a lot of collision data, says SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, a member of the ATLAS particle detector experiment with Stroynowski and other SMU physicists.
Evaluating that much data isn’t humanly possible, so a computerized ATLAS hardware “trigger system” grabs the data, makes a fast evaluation, decides if it might hold something of interest to physicists, than quickly discards or saves it.
The Liquid Argon Calorimeter sits at the heart of ATLAS, measuring the energies carried by particle interactions. (CERN)
“That gets rid of 99.999 percent of the data,” Kehoe said. “This trigger hardware system makes measurements — but they are very crude, fast and primitive.”
To further pare down the data, a custom-designed software program culls even more data from each nano-second grab, reducing 40 million events down to 200.
Two groups from SMU, one led by Kehoe, helped develop software to monitor the performance of the trigger systems’ thousands of computer processors.
“The software program has to be accurate in deciding which 200 to keep. We must be very careful that it’s the right 200 — the 200 that might tell us more about the Higgs boson, for example. If it’s not the right 200, then we can’t achieve our scientific goals.”
The ATLAS computers are part of CERN’s computing center, which stores more than 30 petabytes of data from the LHC experiments every year, the equivalent of 1.2 million Blu-ray discs.
Flood of data from ATLAS transmitted via tiny electronics designed at SMU to withstand harsh conditions
An SMU physics team also collaborates on the design, construction and delivery of the ATLAS “readout” system — an electronic system within the ATLAS trigger system that sends collision data from ATLAS to its data processing farm.
Data from the ATLAS particle detector’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter is transmitted via 1,524 small fiber-optic transmitters. A powerful and reliable workhorse, the link is one of thousands of critical components on the LHC that contributed to discovery and precision measurement of the Higgs boson.
The custom-made high-speed data transmitters were designed to withstand extremely harsh conditions — low temperature and high radiation.
“It’s not always a smooth ride operating electronics in such a harsh environment,” said Jingbo Ye, the physics professor who leads the SMU data-link team. “Failure of any transmitter results in the loss of a chunk of valuable data. We’re working to improve the design for future detectors because by 2017 and 2018, the existing optical data-link design won’t be able to carry all the data.”
Each electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical signal converter transmits 1.6 gigabytes of data per second. Lighter and smaller than their widely used commercial counterpart, the tiny, wickedly fast transmitters have been transmitting from the Liquid Argon Calorimeter for about 10 years.
Upgraded optical data link is now in the works to accommodate beefed-up data flow
A more powerful data link — much smaller and faster than the current one — is in research and development now. Slated for installation in 2017, it has the capacity to deliver 5.2 gigabytes of data per second.
The new link’s design has been even more challenging than the first, Ye said. It has a smaller footprint than the first, but handles more data, while at the same time maintaining the existing power supply and heat exchanger now in the ATLAS detector.
The link will have the highest data density in the world of any data link based on the transmitter optical subassembly TOSA, a standard industrial package, Ye said.
Fine-tuning the new, upgraded machine will take several weeks
The world’s most powerful machine for smashing protons together will require some “tuning” before physicists from around the world are ready to take data, said Stephen Sekula, a researcher on ATLAS and assistant professor of physics at SMU.
The trick is to get reliable, stable beams that can remain in collision state for 8 to 12 to 24 hours at a time, so that the particle physicists working on the experiments, who prize stability, will be satisfied with the quality of the beam conditions being delivered to them, Sekula said.
“The LHC isn’t a toaster,” he said. “We’re not stamping thousands of them out of a factory every day, there’s only one of them on the planet and when you upgrade it it’s a new piece of equipment with new idiosyncrasies, so there’s no guarantee it will behave as it did before.”
Machine physicists at CERN must learn the nuances of the upgraded machine, he said. The beam must be stable, so physicists on shifts in the control room can take high-quality data under stable operating conditions.
The process will take weeks, Sekula said.
10 times as many Higgs particles means a flood of data to sift for gems
LHC Run 2 will collide particles at a staggering 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), which is 60 percent higher than any accelerator has achieved before.
“On paper, Run 2 will give us four times more data than we took on Run 1,” Sekula said. “But each of those multiples of data are actually worth more. Because not only are we going to take more collisions, we’re going to do it at a higher energy. When you do more collisions and you do them at a higher energy, the rate at which you make Higgs Bosons goes way up. We’re going to get 10 times more Higgs than we did in run 1 — at least.”
SMU’s ManeFrame supercomputer plays a key role in helping physicists from the Large Hadron Collider experiments. One of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation, it allows physicists at SMU and around the world to sift through the flood of data, quickly analyze massive amounts of information, and deliver results to the collaborating scientists.
During Run 1, the LHC delivered about 8,500 Higgs particles a week to the scientists, but also delivered a huge number of other kinds of particles that have to be sifted away to find the Higgs particles. Run 2 will make 10 times that, Sekula said. “So they’ll rain from the sky. And with more Higgs, we’ll have an easier time sifting the gems out of the gravel.”
Run 2 will operate at the energy originally intended for Run 1, which was initially stalled by a faulty electrical connection on some superconducting magnets in a sector of the tunnel. Machine physicists were able to get the machine running — just never at full power. And still the Higgs was discovered, notes SMU physics professor Fredrick Olness.
“The 2008 magnet accident at the LHC underscores just how complex a machine this is,” Olness said. “We are pushing the technology to the cutting-edge.”
Huge possibilities for new discoveries, but some will be more important than others
There are a handful of major new discoveries that could emerge from Run 2 data, Stroynowski said.
New physics laws related to Higgs — Physicists know only global Higgs properties, many with very poor understanding. They will be measuring Higgs properties with much greater precision, and any deviation from the present picture will indicate new physics laws. “Improved precision is the only guaranteed outcome of the coming run,” Stroynowski said. “But of course we hope that not everything will be as expected. Any deviation may be due to supersymmetry or something completely new.”
Why basic particles have such a huge range of masses — Clarity achieved by precision measurements of Higgs properties may help to shed light on the exact reason for the pattern of masses found in the known fundamental particles. If new particles are discovered in the LHC during Run 2, the mathematical theories that could explain them might also shed light on the puzzle of why masses have such diversity in the building blocks of nature
Dark matter — Astronomical observations require a new form of matter that acts only via gravity, otherwise all galaxies would have fallen apart a long time ago. One candidate theory is supersymmetry, which predicts a host of new particles. Some of those particles, if they exist, would fit the characteristics of dark matter. LHC scientists will be looking for them in the coming run both directly, and for indirect effects.
Quark gluon plasma — In collisions of lead nuclei with each other, LHC scientists have observed a new form of matter called quark gluon plasma. Thought to have been present in the cosmos near the very beginning of time, making and studying this state of matter could teach us more about the early, hot, dense universe.
Mini black-holes — Some scientists are looking for “mini black-holes” predicted by innovative physicist Stephen Hawking, but that is considered “a v-e-e-e-e-r-y long shot,” Stroynowski said.
Matter-antimatter — A cosmic imbalance in the amounts of matter and its opposite, antimatter, must be explained by particle physics. The LHC is home to several experiments and teams that aim to search for answers.
SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. DOE labs — that participate in discovery experiments
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SMU’s experimental physics group played a pivotal role in discovering the Higgs boson — the particle that proves the theory for which two scientists have received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the Nobel Prize to theorists Peter W. Higgs and François Englert to recognize their work developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles mass. U.S. scientists played a significant role in advancing the theory and in discovering the particle that proves the existence of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson.
The Nobel citation recognizes Higgs and Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
In the 1960s, Higgs and Englert, along with other theorists, including Robert Brout, Tom Kibble and Americans Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik, published papers introducing key concepts in the theory of the Higgs field. In 2012, scientists on the international ATLAS and CMS experiments, performed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Europe, confirmed this theory when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.
“A scientist may test out a thousand different ideas over the course of a career. If you’re fortunate, you get to experiment with one that works,” says SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson. As the leader of an SMU Department of Physics team working on the experiment, Stroynowski served as U.S. coordinator for the ATLAS Experiment’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter, which measures energy from the particles created by proton collisions.
The University’s experimental physics group has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.
SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy laboratories — that participate in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, making up about 23 percent of the ATLAS collaboration and 33 percent of CMS at the time of the Higgs discovery. Brookhaven National Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the ATLAS experiment, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the CMS experiment. U.S. scientists provided a significant portion of the intellectual leadership on Higgs analysis teams for both experiments.
Preliminary discovery results were announced July 4, 2012 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia.
“It is an honor that the Nobel Committee recognizes these theorists for their role in predicting what is one of the biggest discoveries in particle physics in the last few decades,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “I congratulate the whole particle physics community for this achievement.”
The majority of U.S. scientists participating in LHC experiments work primarily from their home institutions, remotely accessing and analyzing data through high-capacity networks and grid computing. The United States plays an important role in this distributed computing system, providing 23 percent of the computing power for ATLAS and 40 percent for CMS. The United States also supplied or played a leading role in several main components of the two detectors and the LHC accelerator, amounting to a value of $164 million for the ATLAS detector, $167 million for the CMS detector, and $200 million for the LHC. Support for the U.S. effort comes from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.
“It’s wonderful to see a 50-year-old theory confirmed after decades of hard work and remarkable ingenuity,” said Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs. “The U.S. has played a key role, contributing scientific and technical expertise along with essential computing and data analysis capabilities — all of which were necessary to bring the Higgs out of hiding. It’s a privilege to share in the success of an experiment that has changed the face of science.”
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN was the culmination of decades of effort by physicists and engineers around the world, at the LHC but also at other accelerators such as the Tevatron accelerator, located at Fermilab, and the Large Electron Positron accelerator, which once inhabited the tunnel where the LHC resides. Work by scientists at the Tevatron and LEP developed search techniques and eliminated a significant fraction of the space in which the Higgs boson could hide.
Several contributors from SMU have made their mark on the project at various stages, including current Department of Physics faculty members Ryszard Stroynowski, Jingbo Ye, Robert Kehoe and Stephen Sekula. Faculty members Pavel Nadolsky and Fred Olness performed theoretical calculations used in various aspects of data analysis.
University postdoctoral fellows on the ATLAS Experiment have included Julia Hoffmann, David Joffe, Ana Firan, Haleh Hadavand, Peter Renkel, Aidan Randle-Conde and Daniel Goldin.
SMU has awarded eight Ph.D. and seven M.Sc. degrees to students who performed advanced work on ATLAS, including Ryan Rios, Rozmin Daya, Renat Ishmukhametov, Tingting Cao, Kamile Dindar, Pavel Zarzhitsky and Azzedin Kasmi.
Significant contributions to ATLAS have also been made by SMU faculty members in the Department of Physics’ Optoelectronics Lab, including Tiankuan Liu, Annie Xiang and Datao Gong.
“The discovery of the Higgs is a great achievement, confirming an idea that will require rewriting of the textbooks,” Stroynowski says. “But there is much more to be learned from the LHC and from ATLAS data in the next few years. We look forward to continuing this work.”
Higgs and Englert published their papers independently and did not meet in person until the July 4, 2012, announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Higgs, 84, is a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Englert, 80, is a professor emeritus at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
The prize was announced at 5:45 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
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