The harder you smash something into something else, the more likely you are to break one of them open.

When it comes down to it, this statement of the seemingly obvious is actually what drives the work of physicists working at a high-energy particle accelerator, such as the 2-kilometer diameter Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Laboratory, (Fermilab), in Batavia, Ill.

Two professors, one post-doctoral research associate, four graduate students and one undergraduate from Iowa State, and members of the Department of Physics’ Alpha High-Energy research group are working with Fermilab. They are using this principle to try to uncover some of nature’s deeply hidden mysteries.

John Hauptman, associate professor of physics and co-principal investigator for the alpha group, said “The de Broglie wavelength formula is maybe the fundamental basis for our work at Fermilab.”

In 1924, Louis de Broglie discovered moving matter can act like a wave as well as a particle.

De Broglie’s simple formula states the greater the wavelength’s momentum, the smaller the wavelength, Hauptman said.

But an object’s wavelength is essentially a measure of the size of objects with which it can interact.. So, if one gives a subatomic particle a whole lot of momentum, one can make it interact with really small things, he said.

Hence, the harder you smash something into something else, the more likely you are to break one of them open.

“The pattern to the way two objects scatter from each other when they are both point-like is well-known — it’s called Rutherford scattering. Thus, when high-energy physicists see this pattern in a collision, they know that the energy they’ve given the particles isn’t enough to break one open and see what’s inside,” Hauptman said.

Three of the graduate students, as well as the post-doctoral research associate, are working at Fermilab, and each is trying a slightly different method to uncover unseen aspects or building blocks of nature, Hauptman said.

First there was the atom. Then came the atomic nucleus, then the constituents of the nucleus, the proton and neutron. Then, sometime after World War II, someone discovered the proton and neutron are actually composed of three smaller particles called quarks, Hauptman said.

The quarks, along with electrons, neutrinos—the particles that convey force between other particles—the heavier particles that are actually cousins of the “normal” ones, and an anti-particle for each particle make up what is considered today to be the fundamental, “standard model” for the physical universe, Hauptman said.

Jay Wightman, the group’s post-doctoral researcher at Fermilab, is using the proton-anti-proton collisions that go every on day and night at Fermilab’s collider to search for any evidence that quarks have something smaller inside them. “Jay recently found what looked like a deviation from the Rutherford scattering pattern for the quarks,” Hauptman said, “but this was later accounted for.”

Kristal Mauritz, one of the graduate students working at the lab, is using the same proton-anti-proton collisions to look for evidence of a different event. There has been a mystery for the past 30 years about what is behind an interaction between two quarks, in which, contrary to the norm, no information is exchanged between the quarks, save for a little momentum.

“We’ve found a large signal for an interaction which is not predicted by theory in which a proton or anti-proton collides with the mysterious ‘pomeron,’ because there’s no stuff strewn in the direction in which the pomeron had been going,” Mauritz said.