Researchers at UW-Madison have recently unveiled a new image processor that will be used during particle accelerator experiments at CERN, a center for particle physics research near Geneva, on the Franco-Swiss border. The tool will analyze particle collisions in the hopes of advancing our understanding of the structure of the universe.
Effectively, we take snapshots of collisions 40 million times per second in order to determine the usefulness of the data,\ said Pamela Klabbers, a UW-Madison scientist involved with the project. The ""interesting"" data is then passed on to other processors built by teams from Bristol and Vienna.
The image processor, dubbed the ""Regional Calorimeter Trigger,"" has been in development since the early 1990s. It is powered by almost 200 custom processor boards divided into nine server racks. Each board processes data using chips engineered by UW-Madison faculty.
The end result is a system that processes 4 trillion bits of data per second, which, according to UW-Madison professor of high energy physics Wesley Smith, ""is equivalent to 6 million billion floating point operations per second, or about one million desktop PCs.""
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is currently being constructed at CERN. When completed, it will accelerate protons to energies comparable to a swarm of mosquitoes. While that may not sound very powerful, a single collision will generate 11 kilowatts—enough to power more than 150 lightbulbs.
Along with other projects conducted using the LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, where the Regional Calorimeter Trigger will be used, hopes to help answer some of the biggest questions in modern physics. Among other results expected from the experiment, scientists hope to find proof of the existence of the Higgs particle, which would explain why all other particles in the universe have mass.
Physicists will also use the results from the experiment to look for evidence of supersymmetric particles, which have been predicted by many theories for years, but have never yet been directly observed. Such a discovery would be a major step forward in discovering a unified theory. According to Klabbers, ""We haven't had the energies required to observe certain phenomenon before now.""
The Large Hadron Collider certainly isn't the end-all of particle accelerators. Already, scientists at Fermilab, a particle physics facility near Chicago, have started developing plans for a Very Large Hadron Collider, which, according to a preliminary investigation, could be capable of accelerating particles more than ten times the energy of the CERN facility. However, given the current state of funding, such an experiment wouldn't be economically feasible for several decades.
And as for the Regional Calorimeter Trigger? While tests of individual components have all been successful, no one will know if it produces the desired result until the LHC goes into operation in 2007. ""I'll be on pins and needles until then,"" Klabbers said.
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