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Balance Shifts in Race for Physics' Grail
As the Europeans shut down to build new
equipment, a U.S. team gains the advantage in quest to
find the Higgs boson. The elusive particle is thought to
help underpin the universe.
By K.C. COLE, Times Science Writer
BATAVIA, ILL.--Not since Shakespeare has there
been so much ado about nothing:
The production involves billions of dollars,
thousands of physicists, two of the world's largest
scientific laboratories and dozens of miles of racetracks
for subatomic particles cruising at 99.9999% of the
speed of light.
The star players are particle detectors the size of
shopping malls--each with millions of channels of
electronics hardened to military specifications, every
connection custom-made and hand-wrought by groups
of graduate students from Iowa to Minsk.
The stakes don't get any higher. "I've only been
obsessed about it for 20 years," said physicist Chris
Quigg of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or
Fermilab, outside Chicago.
The focus of all this brain and brawn is a particle
known as the Higgs--a crucial piece of the underlying
structure responsible for making the universe what it is
today. Without this structure--the so-called Higgs
field--the universe would still be as it was in the
beginning of time, a featureless mist of particles and
forces--everything the same, no gravity, no electricity,
no quarks or atoms or stars.
Physicists believe the Higgs field shattered this
primordial sameness by, in effect, freezing the mist into
the vacuum that supports our universe today. It's the
Higgs that gives structure to the vacuum--what people
normally think of as "nothing." Without that structure,
nothing else would exist. The vacuum is a nothing that
determines everything.
The problem is that no one has seen hard evidence
that the Higgs really exists. If it does, physicists should
be able to knock loose a chunk of it in powerful
collisions of subatomic particles.
So far, they haven't succeeded. Until they do, the
Higgs exists only in theory--leaving a gaping hole in the
standard model of particle physics.
To find this elusive missing piece, Fermilab is locked
in a fierce struggle with its European counterpart, the
nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland, known as
CERN.
It's a chance, Quigg said, to be the first to peer
inside nature's head. "There is no finer moment than the
moment you understand something before anybody else
does," he said.
The competition to find the Higgs is almost uncannily
like the fight over the presidency, physicists say. Both
will ultimately turn on statistics; both have no clear end;
both winners will reap enormous payoffs.
Finding the Higgs at Fermilab would be "a huge
psychological boost," Quigg said. On the other hand, if
the prize goes to Europe, U.S. physicists fear that they
could lose their bid to build the next generation of
accelerators on American soil.
"For Fermilab, it's a chance to cement its place in
physics for the next 20 years, based on what we do in
the next five," said physicist John Womersley,
spokesman for one of the Fermilab experiments. "If we
don't succeed, we can't claim that we need to be here."
As of now, things are looking up for physicists
working on this side of the Atlantic. Last month,
Fermilab was handed the discovery of the Higgs on a
platter, some physicists say, when competitors at
CERN temporarily dropped out of the race. The hints
they had seen of the Higgs in their detectors last month
were ultimately not enough to convince CERN's
director to halt the planned destruction of the current
machine to make room for a new, much more powerful
one.
The decision was agonizing. For weeks, petitions
circulated, rumors flew, minds changed overnight;
evidence that looked solid Wednesday evaporated by
Thursday. And then it was over. Now CERN can only
wait until their new machine--the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC)--comes on line in 2006; and hope that
Fermilab won't get there first.
"It's a Shakespearean tragedy," said CERN
spokesman Niel Calder. Like presidential candidates
George W. Bush and Al Gore, "They were so close
they could taste it," he said. Now CERN must wait
while the competition has its chance.
If the hints that the CERN accelerator saw were the
real thing, Fermilab could make the actual sighting
before the LHC comes on line.
But Fermilab's victory is far from a sure thing. "It's
going to be tough," Quigg said.
The quest for the Higgs is an unusual kind of
competition. For one thing, it's hard to say who's on
which team. Although CERN's 20 member states are
European, half of the physicists working there hail from
other countries, most from the United States. And
nearly a third of Fermilab's scientists are non-U.S.
citizens.
CERN theorist John Ellis compares it to the
competition between baseball teams. "How many
Yankees come from New York?" he asked.
For another thing, the two laboratories can't race
against each other in the normal sense. CERN will have
to wait like a gymnast with a 9.8, sitting on her hands
while her competitor earns a 9.9 to win the gold. Or,
alternatively, falls off the bars.
"Suddenly, the eyes of the world are on us," said
Fermilab's Franco Bedeschi, an Italian. "Any misstep
we make, people will be asking, 'Why?' "
"It's going to be a long haul," said Bedeschi's
colleague Al Goshaw. People are expecting them to
find the Higgs right away, he said. But for now they'll be
doing all they can simply to get to know their
completely rebuilt machines--back in service after a
five-year, multimillion dollar make-over.
Many physicists at CERN are predictably unhappy
about the brutal suspension of the lab's chance to find
the Higgs. One internal memo circulating recently
complained that "CERN will look ridiculous to have
missed this opportunity."
Of course, physics is supposed to be impartial. It
shouldn't make any difference who finds it as long as it's
found.
"You might say, what difference does it make?
We're all brothers and sisters in the great search for
truth," said Calder. "On the other hand, grrrrrrrrr!"
Loss of European Experiments
Jason Nielsen is one of the American physicists now
mourning the loss of his experiment at CERN. Still a
graduate student at the University of Wisconsin,
Nielson has nonetheless been one of the machine
experts on ALEPH, the CERN detector that saw the
first evidence of the Higgs and had a possible crack at
its "discovery."
"No more late nights baby-sitting for the detector,"
he said recently, driving for perhaps the last time to visit
ALEPH in its "pit" 140 meters underground.
The Alps light up in Day-Glo pink as the sun sets
over the Jura Mountains to the west, newly dusted with
the season's first snow. The drive to the other side of
the 17-mile-circumference ring takes him across the
border from Switzerland into France, through small
French towns and rolling green fields stacked with bales
of hay and bordered by bright red and yellow autumn
foliage.
Here, there is not much more than French
countryside and particle physicists.
At the laboratory's main complex back near
Geneva, physicists sit at long tables in the cafeteria
sipping wine and coffee, speaking more languages than
most people can even name. The native English
speakers alone babble in several distinct dialects,
including Scot, Irish, English, Australian, Brooklyn,
Texan.
There are more women physicists than evident at
U.S. labs, many of them Italian. More children too.
CERN is a nice place to work, with long vacations, a
French pastry chef, and the kind of steady funding that
is only a dream for U.S. physicists.
Now, however, much of CERN will be entering
hibernation and physics' center of gravity is slowly
shifting to the Illinois prairie, where buffalo roam inside
Fermilab's main 4-mile-circumference ring. Nielsen,
along with many of his colleagues, will probably be
moving West. "Physics follow the data," he said.
The move to Fermilab complicates the search for
Higgs. For one thing, in the accelerator being
dismantled at CERN, electrons and their antimatter
counterparts--positrons--collided with each other. Both
are "point particles," with no internal structure. The
collisions produced a clean burst of energy. Physicists
know exactly what went in--making it relatively easy to
deduce what came out.
Fermilab's Tevatron, on the other hand, smashes
protons into anti-protons. Each proton is a collection of
three loosely attached quarks. That makes the collisions
messy. "You don't even know what's going into the
collision," Quigg said. (The messiness is worth it
because protons can be made to collide at much higher
energies.)
When the Tevatron starts taking data again next
spring, 99 tightly bunched clusters of protons will
collide with an equal number of anti-protons 10 million
times a second, causing a fireworks of particle creation.
The result, said Goshaw, will be "a fire hose of
information."
To catch what comes out, two giant detectors
embrace the collision points--the real guts of the
enterprise.
"You're touching nature in a real sense," said
Womersley. "Theorists are people who postulate what's
in nature's head, but we're up to our elbows in the
insides of bodies."
Obstacle Course for Flying Particles
The Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, has just
been brought out after a successful test run. The 12-ton
door stands open, exposing some of the inner
chambers, under flags of Japan, Taiwan, Italy, United
States and Canada.
All particle detectors, at heart, are metal cylinders
with caps, like corks, at both ends that can be removed
for maintenance. The particles flying out from the
collision point at the center have to make their way
through an obstacle course of chambers that surround it
like layers of an onion.
In the process, the particles get bent by
super-strong magnetic fields, bounced into noxious gas
molecules, zapped with high voltages, pushed through
sieves of fine wires and generally digested in the thick
guts of detectors that can stand six stories high.
These monsters look, and sound, almost alive. The
thumps of the fans and vacuum systems pulse loudly
through the cathedral-sized pits, while other
components gurgle, hum, buzz; yellow lights flash
warnings: danger. High tension. No flames.
Tubing and wires of every conceivable size carry
gases, cooling water, power--the life support of the
system. Tens of thousands of multicolored cables carry
electronic signals out.
"This is where you come in the middle of the night
when something doesn't work," Nielsen said. "Every
one of these cables is somebody's baby"--built by a
graduate student somewhere like himself. "You feel [the
connection] in your gut."
Boxes of electronics bear the names of the
institutions where students hand-built them: University
of Wisconsin. Trieste. MPI (for Max Planck Institute, in
Germany).
The signals captured in the detector eventually make
their way into the control room, stacked with computer
monitors (and in some cases, bottles of
champagne--the fruits of past victories).
At the Collider Detector at Fermilab, the control
room has its usual assortment of specialists: the "aces,"
who are mostly post-docs; the "sci co" (pronounced
psycho), or scientific coordinator; the s.o.s., or safety
officer on shift.
But what they actually "see"-- or what anybody will
actually "see" from all this mass of information--is only a
tiny fraction of what is actually produced.
Of the 10 million collisions per second that will be
produced in the Tevatron, for example, only a handful
will get a careful look. Exactly which handful is a
decision made by high-powered computers. Known as
"trigger" systems, these computerized "sieves" throw out
all of the ordinary, everyday stuff--and keep only the
gems that might contain something unusual. Like Higgs
boson, for example.
How do they know they haven't thrown out a gem
by mistake? They try to simulate every conceivable
outcome of a collision on computers beforehand, so the
trigger knows exactly what to look for. Still, throwing
out something potentially precious is "a big worry,"
Goshaw said. "You can be fooled."
For every series of particle tracks that looks like it
came from a Higgs, for example, there will be 10,000
very similar patterns of tracks that could come from
some "ordinary" process--such as a couple of quarks
turning into other particles.
Thus, proving the existence of the Higgs--like
proving guilt using DNA evidence--will turn on
statistics. Physicists need to get their probability of error
down to about 1 in a million before they can claim a
"discovery."
For all the seeming hype associated with the
discovery of the Higgs particle, its significance is hard to
overstate. First proposed by Peter Higgs of the
University of Edinburgh in 1964, it's outgrown its
original role and now does what is arguably the most
important function in fundamental physics: It gives
forces and particles identity. It changes the universe
from an undifferentiated chaos into the structured
cosmos of quarks and electrons and gravity and
electricity we now inhabit.
"Knowing there is a Higgs says, yes, there is a field
that can do [that], and it occurs in the way we thought,"
Fermilab physicist Joe Lykken said.
To be sure, many physicists contend that the Higgs
is so well established in theory--and by previous
experiments at CERN--that its discovery today will be
no big deal. "It's like waiting for the other shoe to
drop," MIT physicist Frank Wilczek said.
Still, he conceded, "There is a magic about the
particle that goes far beyond its physics. And they may
find something completely different. Nature has the last
word."
Wherever--and whenever--the Higgs is found, the
search itself is likely to have enormous effects on the
field of particle physics--still hurting from the
cancellation of the half-built Superconducting
Supercollider, killed by Congress in 1993. Now
nothing but a huge hole in the ground in Texas, the
mammoth accelerator would surely have had the Higgs
in hand by now, scientists believe. That lost opportunity
makes the current search all the more poignant.
"I think we all feel some connection to this," Quigg
said. "It's always amazing that we little humans can
make up a story about the universe and find that it's
true."
Or as Fermilab's Harry Weerts put it even more
bluntly: "We've been at this for 20 years. I want to find
it, and I want to find it now."
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