The materials must not only be uniform and produced to exacting tolerances, but they must be relatively cheap, said Kirk. The trick is to make the plastic and the lead to such uniformity that the amount of energy absorbed will be consistent at any point in the million-layer sandwiches. Scintillating optical fibers embedded in the plastic will carry the light away from the calorimeter, where it can be converted to electrical impulses, measured and recorded.
The plastic must have the property of producing light energy when struck by subatomic particles, a characteristic called scintillation. The calorimeter will consist of plastic layers sandwiched between lead layers. This component will measure the energy of particles produced in the proton collisions. ''We`ve got hundreds of problems that require new technology.''Īrgonne is working with several universities and technology companies to design and build a calorimeter for the new detector. ''Building the detector poses many more challenges than building the supercollider itself,'' Kirk said. If they don`t find it, physicists will have to scrap much of the Standard Model and rethink their ideas about how the universe works.Īpart from the intellectual challenge of understanding nature, the technological complexities necessary to build a detector should have several benefits to industry, said Argonne`s Kirk. The supercollider is designed to be so powerful that scientists are certain to discover the Higgs mechanism if it actually exists.
#Superconducting supercollider upgrade
Innovations devised for the new detector will be applied to upgrade the existing CDF, he said.įermilab people are also working on components that will go into the first prototype magnets that will be used in the supercollider itself to make the proton beams operate, Peoples said. Many people who built and operate the CDF detector, which measures and analyzes data produced by the Tevatron in the search for the top quark at Fermilab, are also involved in designing the new supercollider detector, said John Peoples, Fermilab director. This is similar to what scientists now do at Fermilab in their search for the top quark, thought to be the last fundamental building block of matter left for scientists to discover.īut because the supercollider is intended to run with energies three orders of magnitude greater than Fermilab`s Tevatron, the problems of measurement and analysis are far beyond existing technology. The supercollider is expected to produce 100 million collisions each second, with each collision generating as many as 1,000 newly created particles.Įxotic materials that interact with the particles to produce energy will be tied to devices that convert the information to electrical impulses for recording and analysis by banks of computers working in parallel.Īfter it is recorded, the information must be sifted by more sophisticated computers using artificial intelligence to look for interesting patterns that can, in turn, be passed along to scientists. As protons smash into each other, scientists must count and describe the hundreds and thousands of particles produced by each collision and measure the energy of each. The supercollider is designed to fling beams of protons around its ring to raise their energies to levels approaching those achieved at the moment of the universe`s birth. Some particles, like photons that carry light, are unaffected by this field, while other particles, equally small, are strongly coupled to the Higgs field, making them extremely heavy.Īlthough the supercollider`s main goal is relatively easy to state, accomplishing that goal is a daunting technological challenge. According to this notion, the universe is permeated by a field that all particles pass through as they travel. One explanation is the so-called Higgs mechanism, named for Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist. But this basic picture of how the universe works, called the Standard Model, doesn`t explain why some fundamental particles are extremely heavy and others weigh nothing, or nearly nothing, at all. At present, physicists have a good idea of how matter is made up and how fundamental forces of nature affect it.
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