Big Science, big opportunities
[ UniNews Vol. 12, No. 4
24 March - 7 April 2003 ]
Australian physicists create opportunities for local industry
University of Melbourne physicists are leading Australias participation in a $500m high energy particle experiment, known as ATLAS, at CERN in Geneva.
More than 2000 physicists from 150 institutes in 45 countries are working on ATLAS, which will explore new frontiers in understanding the constituents of matter and their interactions.
ATLAS will be conducted in a next-generation high energy particle accelerator CERNs Large Hadron Collider now under construction.
Melbournes role in ATLAS includes developing high-precision particle detectors and related infrastructure as part of Australias contribution to the project.
Last year the Melbourne team supervised the despatch of key Australian-manufactured components for ATLAS copper alloy radiation shields weighing some 35 tonnes.
Installation of the Australian radiation shields recently, reported by CERN to fit into position without any problems whatsoever, highlights Australias front-running to supply other components, says Professor Geoffrey Taylor, who leads Melbournes ATLAS team and Australias part in the experiment.
By Geoffrey Taylor
Fundamental science is Big Science. Astrophysics and high energy particle physics, the two extremes of fundamental research at the very largest scales and at the very smallest scales, are the leaders in putting the Big into Big Science.
Astrophysics and high energy particle physics have impressive histories of discovery, leading to new challenges and new understandings. The best of young minds continue to be attracted to these fields, driving the frontiers of knowledge and challenging current world views.
Both of these pursuits have advanced by taking advantage of available technology at the same time as they have advanced technologies themselves.
Not only has the advancement of science been led by scientists, but there has been an essential partnership with industry throughout the process.
High energy particle physics is concerned with understanding the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions at the most fundamental level.
From simple beginnings making use of natural radioactivity, the field has advanced through the invention and development of particle accelerators. State-of-the-art accelerators are large industrial facilities financed and built in collaboration between many nations from around the world.
Currently under construction is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. It is a $3 billion, 27km ring of 10,000 advanced superconducting magnets, surrounding a high-vacuum tube in which particles circulate, accelerated by high power radio frequency electromagnetic fields to the highest energies possible today.
The scale is industrial and the technology is industrial. Such a facility cannot be built by universities and research institutes alone. Industrial know-how, especially in achieving uniform quality and cost efficiencies in production of large numbers of components, is essential to the success of this project as is the transfer to industry of laboratory-developed technology (for example in high field magnets).
Experiments to be conducted in the LHC are also of industrial scale and well beyond the capabilities of small groups. The experiments must be designed and built to exacting standards and they make demanding use of existing technologies, as well as generating new ones.
University of Melbourne physicists are actively engaged in the field of high energy particle physics, with major participation at CERN, and at the Japanese national laboratory, KEK, in Tsukuba.
The ATLAS experiment, a massive international collaboration of physicists, will operate in the LHC beam. The key goal of the LHC, together with the ATLAS experiment and a second experiment at CERN, known as CMS, is to probe the origin of the masses of the fundamental particles and hence of all matter.
The interaction postulated to result in mass is expected to have a measurable consequence a very short-lived particle dubbed the Higgs Boson. The existence of the mass-giving interaction would have resulted in Higgs Bosons existing in the first million-millionth of a second of the universe after the Big Bang, but these primordial particles have long since disappeared.
The way to test the theory is to provide the conditions under which they would be expected to be created and to observe the Higgs particles (if they are indeed produced). They would be identifiable only by observation of the products of their decays.
The necessary machine to create these particles is the LHC. The necessary experiment to record the evidence of their creation and decay is ATLAS (and the competing CMS experiment).
The ATLAS experiment is seven storeys high and 40 metres long and yet it will have a precision in localising the tracks of high energy particles to an accuracy of a fraction of the width of a human hair.
Industry participation is absolutely essential to build such an object.
One such successful industrial partnership involved the Western Australian company VEEM Engineering Group Pty Ltd, which specialises in manufacturing (among other products) large, precise ship propellers. The Australian companys skills were successfully applied to producing large component copper alloy radiation shielding for the ATLAS detector. The first of these shields was recently installed without problem into the heart of the ATLAS detector.
The radiation shielding is the first of such in-kind contributions from Australia. VEEM manufactured it under a $450,000 contract.
The company met tight technical specifications set by the ATLAS collaboration and the quality of its work was highly praised.
The experience gained with the radiation shielding contract places the company in an excellent position to tender for further components of the project. The message for Australian industry is that potential exists to go beyond Australias agreed commitment and to gain commercial contracts with other participating nations.
Information about ATLAS is available on the School of Physics website at http://epp.ph.unimelb.edu.au/epp/epp/epp_atlas.html
Professor Geoffrey Taylor is a leading international particle physicist and Head of the University of Melbournes School of Physics. The ATLAS projects Australian participants are the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Wollongong. Australias contribution to the project includes developments in high precision silicon detectors, electronics, data handling, massive computing and radiation monitoring.
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