Scientific showdown takes shape

Fermilab hopes to find elusive particle before Swiss site opens

September 05, 2007|By Jeremy Manier, Tribune staff reporter

GENEVA, Switzerland — More than 300 feet beneath the suburbs and sunflower fields at the French-Swiss border lies a high-tech beast that may signal the doom of Fermilab.

The particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider is coming to life in tunnels and caverns that crackle with the anticipation of an enterprise at the leading edge of physics. For 40 years, that vaunted role belonged to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, bringing the Chicago area civic prestige and unique academic clout, but that's about to change.

Everything about the European facility dwarfs its counterpart physics lab in Batavia. Right now Fermilab houses the world's most powerful particle accelerator, smashing together bits of matter and antimatter to unlock the secrets of nature. But the LHC will be seven times more powerful when it begins operation next year, making the Illinois device almost instantly obsolete.

The time pressure has launched Fermilab on a flat-out sprint to prove the existence of a tiny, theoretical particle called the Higgs boson, a linchpin of prevailing ideas about how the universe is put together. If experts are right, the Higgs gives everything its mass, its heft -- from the subatomic mist to people, buildings and stars.

Internet rumormongers claimed earlier this year that the Batavia lab already had spotted signs of the prized particle. Project leaders say any speculation is premature, though they could get an answer within the next year.

Their quest marks the poignant closing of an era, for Fermilab and for physics in America. Once the lab's main accelerator finishes its work and shuts down in 2009, it will be the first time since scientists started exploring the subatomic "energy frontier" that no American facility will be leading the way.

"For us it's a painful experience," said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. "We are at the center of the physics universe right now. And when the LHC opens we won't be."

Some smaller experiments will continue at Fermilab, and the lab hopes to land new projects in the next decade. But the facility's unmatched intellectual energy will fade, for a few years if not longer. Scientists who once made pilgrimages to Fermilab's mighty collider already have started new work in Switzerland.

The value of such labs transcends national pride. They are the world's most powerful microscopes, able to crack open the tiniest bits of matter and unveil the strange realm inside. That requires small cities of engineers and theorists working at the limit of what advanced materials can withstand and science can predict.

Some physicists call the labs "miracle factories."

The heart of the $10 billion effort on the outskirts of Geneva is a 17-mile underground ring where particles will flit between France and Switzerland at nearly the speed of light. Workers have festooned the subterranean border with national flags and cheeky graffiti.

Four times larger in circumference than the main ring at Fermilab, the LHC will accelerate protons using 1,200 superconducting magnets cooled by the world's largest supply of liquid helium. The accelerator should yield more than 100 times the number of subatomic collisions seen at the Tevatron, the name of Fermilab's big ring.

Scientists expect the collider to discern the Higgs particle within a year or two of starting up -- compared with the Tevatron, which is only now within striking distance after six years of operating at full capacity.

"It's just going to blow the Tevatron out of the water," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the Geneva-based physics organization that runs the new collider.

No one appreciates the challenge better than Jacobo Konigsberg, a leader of the Higgs search at Fermilab whose cell phone belts out the theme from "Mission Impossible."

"There's no down time for me now," said Konigsberg, a Mexican by birth who gave up his soccer hobby in part to accommodate the increasing workload. "Even though the shadow of the LHC looms, we're relentless in our pursuit."

To find the Higgs, Konigsberg and his colleagues must pluck a ghostly needle from an immense haystack of particle haze.

Theorists and journalists often talk of the Higgs boson as a fugitive with a known name and address. In truth the particle is a cipher, a trumped-up placeholder that researchers proposed only because modern physics would not make sense without it.

"It's a black-box description of something we know is present, but we don't know what it is," said Fermilab theorist Chris Hill. The

Higgs holds an enigmatic spot in the Standard Model, the 30-year-old theory that predicts all of the known fundamental particles -- electrons, protons, quarks, muons and even stranger-sounding things. Every other part of the model has fallen into place, with the Higgs the last puzzle piece.