IN SEARCH OF THE LAST BITS OF MATTER	By John Woodford
D e s t i n a t i o n
2005

Few undergraduates get to hob-nob with Nobel Prize winners, so it's understandable that Joseph Kuah, a senior in electrical engineering, found last summer at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland particularly stimulating.

"The excitement there was incredible," Kuah said of his 10 weeks at CERN. "You can sit down to lunch with someone who has won a Nobel Prize, and everyone at the table is talking physics."

And there is much to talk about. Seven years from now, the world's most powerful particle accelerator is to begin smashing protons together in an underground tunnel near Geneva, in search of what current orthodox theory predicts are the last bits of matter remaining to be identified. The scientists will be able to record the particles knocked loose in high-energy collisions controlled within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Two competing teams will use the LHC. Michigan's group is part of the 2,000-member ATLAS (A Toroidal Large Hadron Collider) team. A key component of the ATLAS experiment--a sensitive particle detector called the muon spectrometer drift chamber--will be built in part by Kuah and other members of the U-M team headed by Prof. Homer A. Neal, U-M interim president emeritus and vice president of research emeritus.

When Kuah was at CERN, only three other undergraduates from the United States were working there. "We were guinea pigs," he says. "This year the United States will send many more students. Students from the European members states have already been going there in far greater numbers."

The American involvement owes much to Neal's chairmanship in 1984 of a committee of the National Science Board, which governs the National Science Foundation (NSF). U-M President Emeritus James. J. Duderstadt was also a member of the panel.

"We were looking at the state of undergraduate science education," Neal told Michigan Today in a telephone interview from CERN. "Heads of corporations testified on whether they thought the training in science was sufficient. We also contacted the Department of Defense to get their impression of the scientific knowledge of students as they entered the armed services. We talked to deans, presidents, heads of scientific societies. We came out with a fairly startling conclusion, and that was that the United States was in terrible state in its scientific education programs."

Among the committee's recommendations, Neal said, "was that the NSF should set up programs that let students come to campuses and work with faculty in summer on real, live research projects. Lots of data show this is an important step in students' lives, to be able to work day in and day out with a faculty member and research team. Because the picture you get inside the laboratory is so different from what you get sitting in a classroom hearing descriptions of what someone did in some other place at some other time."

As a result, the NSF set up the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program inside NSF and provided funding to better to meet the nation's needs in this area.

American physicists would prefer to be conducting their experiments on a superconducting supercollider (SSC) outside Ann Arbor or even in Texas, two finalists for proposed SSC sites before Congress abandoned the program. "The Europeans are planning to build their supercollider here even though ours bit the dust," Neal said. "CERN is supported by 14 European countries and in many ways it is the world's leading high-energy physics laboratory. The World Wide Web and many other scientific advances have been invented here."

The United States agreed last December to help fund the 16-mile-circumference ATLAS collider. When Neal arrived in Geneva early this year to talk with the ATLAS lab director, he learned that a competing research team would also be using the hadron collider to hunt for the elusive particles.

Clearly, the more well-trained minds a team has, the better its chances. So, drawing upon his experience working with Joseph Kuah last summer, Neal convinced the NSF to establish a summer program for American undergraduates in Geneva. A dozen are expected this summer, and the number may grow to 25 to 30. Each student would be assigned to work with a senior mentor from the 5,000 scientists at CERN from all over the globe.

"We think this will be a remarkable opportunity for students even if they don't go into physics," Neal said. "They will learn about a new culture, learn or improve a language or two and form lifetime relationships. They will also hear three lectures a week, a number of them by Nobel Prize winners."

Back in Ann Arbor, Joseph Kuah stopped working on the drift chambers one Saturday morning to explain why the project excites him. "This is the new physics," he said. "We're still looking for the Higgs boson--one of the final few particles of matter that we think we have yet to find."

If found, Kuah says, the Higgs could complete the ingredients of matter as they are conceived in current theory, and that could open the way to examining super-symmetry theory. "Super symmetry predicts a whole new family of particles that might exist only at the extremely high energies that ATLAS will help us achieve. It's anyone's guess what that might lead to. It may produce new theories or contradict theories that we think are on solid ground.