CERN enlists Purdue in hadron collider restart

Just a few years after helping discover the Higgs boson particle, Purdue University researchers are on the cusp of better understanding the subatomic makeup of the universe.

Last week’s restart of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, will produce new, more accurate data, according to a CERN news release.

In a matter of months, Purdue researchers will analyze the information produced as protons collide at nearly the speed of light. The data are distributed around the world, including a storage and processing center at Purdue, said Matthew Jones, an associate professor of physics.

“We generate this massive amount of data,” Jones said, “so there’s no one place to host it.”

History of the Higgs boson

The Large Hadron Collider’s first three-year run finished in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle believed to be a key component in the origin of matter, according to the CERN website.

The discovery also explains the Standard Model: The idea that everything in nature is built from a few fundamental building blocks, Jones said.

“We’re trying to understand what the most fundamental laws of nature are. We’re trying to explain things like why is the universe full of matter and not anti-matter, what are the most fundamental constituents of matter,” Jones said. “ ... (The Higgs boson particle) fills in the last missing piece of the puzzle in this mathematical model that’s been developed in the last 100 years.”

Purdue has a long history of working with CERN, including building parts used in experiments and analyzing the resulting data. Some professors have taken a sabbatical to work directly on the project in Geneva, Jones said.

Why the restart is important

After 27 months of maintenance and upgrades, the collider was restarted for a second three-year run and is operating at nearly double that of the last run — a record high energy level.

Jones said this sets the stage to discover particles not yet imagined or to better understand the Higgs boson.

“We certainly expect to be able to measure its properties more precisely. The Higgs boson itself is the simplest possible way of explaining why fundamental particles have mass at all, but there’s nothing to say that nature might be more complex and there might be multiple types of Higgs boson,” he said. “We really need to look for them because if they’re there, it will tell us something amazing about nature that we never knew was there.”