Colliders are "bread and butter" research projects designed to search for the Standard Higgs boson, the only particle in the Standard Model of Elementary Particles and Fields that has not yet been observed directly, said University of Utah physics professor Charlie Jui.

Colliders are designed to circulate proton beams in opposite directions and collide the beams head on in several designated "interaction points." The goal of such experiments is to convert the kinetic energy of the colliding protons to produce and measure exotic massive particles. The proposed SSC in the U.S. was designed to circulate protons at 20 TeV (A TeV is a unit of energy equal to 1 trillion electron volts.) in each direction or 40 TeV of available energy for the interactions, Jui said.

For comparison, the proton-antiproton collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab run by the U.S. Department of Energy in Batavia, Ill., provides 1 TeV for each beam. Previous experiments there and elsewhere have all failed to observe the Higgs boson. If these particles are found, the standard model, more than a quarter-century after its articulation, will finally be complete.

The LHC will simulate interactions under way a million times a second or more since the Earth acquired a thick atmosphere, Jui said, noting that the the collisions of proton beams equivalent in energy of 100 to 1,000 TeV each.

"Some theorists have in recent years surmised the occurrence of micro black holes, which might be producible in a collider," Jui said. "There is no experimental evidence for this phenomenon. Most experimentalists have tended to not even comment on the rather fanciful speculation that the production of such entities might lead to the destruction of the Earth."

The phenomenon in the real world was carefully tracked between May 1997 and April 2006 by the U.'s High Resolution Fly's Eye Experiment. An international consortium is continuing to the gather data on the cosmic rays at the Telescope Array Project near Delta. More information is available at www.cosmic-ray.org

/reading/learn1.html, at findarticles.com/p/articles

/mi_qn4188/is_20070305

/ai_n18722313 and at www .telescopearray.org.

Detailed parameters of the LHC can be found at quench

-analysis.web.cern.ch/quench

-analysis/phd-fs-html/node5 .html.

---

E-mail: jthalman@desnews.com