The United States recently pledged $531 million dollars worth of material and technology to support a new particle accelerator being built in Europe.

While physicists have always worked with one another regardless of their nationality, this is the first time the U.S. government has supported a facility at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics, according to a press release.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will have a 16-mile circumference and will cross the French-Swiss border, according to the press release.

“Every reasonable country is involved … every country that can reasonably afford to be involved,” said John Hauptman, ISU professor of physics and astronomy.

Hauptman and Walter Anderson, also a professor of physics and astronomy, are working on a section of one of the LHC’s detectors, called CMS.

The CMS detector itself is about the size of a five-story building, and ISU physicists are working on a piece that weighs more than 100 tons.

Different universities and labs around the United States are working on different parts of it, Hauptman said, with the big parts being designed at Fermilab in the Chicago suburb of Batavia.

“That leaves us the smaller, sweeter problems,” he said. “They’re also the most demanding and difficult.”

The two ISU faculty members are working on the forward calorimeter detectors with the University of Iowa for CMS, Hauptman said.

There is one calorimeter detector located on either end of the CMS detector.

When a collision occurs in the middle of CMS, quarks smash into each other at very high energies, he said.

The new particles travel out in an “expanding shell,” which bathes the detectors with a “wall of particles.”

It is the job of the detectors, Hauptman said, to record the particles, which are traveling just under the speed of light.

As if that weren’t complicated enough, a collision occurs every 25 nanoseconds, he said.

A nanosecond is one billionth of a second.

Only one in a billion times does anything interesting result from the collisions, Hauptman said, but that one-in-a-billion result may hold the reason for mass.

While Hauptman has been involved in working with the LHC for about three years, the U.S. government wanted to thoroughly research the LHC before spending a lot of money on it.

U.S. Senator James Sensenbrenner, chair of the House Science Committee, carefully reviewed the terms of the agreement and insisted on several additional safeguards for the United States, Hauptman said.

Concerning his own involvement with the project before the U.S. government became involved, Hauptman said the U.S. government has always allowed open communications in the particle physics field.

“It’s innocent,” he said. “You can’t use it to build a better bomb or rocket.”

Hauptman said the need for the new accelerator lies in the understanding of nature.

“The one thing that is missing in the theory of nature is an understanding of the origin of mass,” he said.

The search is underway at Fermilab, which is currently the largest particle accelerator in the world.

It has a circumference of four miles, Hauptman said.

The problem with Fermilab is that it is limited in the energy to which it can accelerate particles, he said.

The LHC will have 10 times the energy of Fermilab, and at that energy, at least theoretically, new particles will be produced, Hauptman said.

The first measurements at the LHC should take place when it becomes operational in the year 2005, according to the press release.