Physicist pins hopes on particle collider

Scott Thomas, a 1987 Utah State University graduate, is working at the frontiers of science. The theoretical physicist is crafting ways to extract fundamental secrets that seem certain to be uncovered by the Large Hadron Collider.

Construction of the world's most powerful particle collider, known as the LHC, is nearing completion beneath the Swiss-French border. Its ring-shaped tunnel is about 16 1/2 miles around and is buried 160 feet to 574 feet under the surface. There, monstrous magnets will guide streams of protons around the tunnel, accelerating them to just below the speed of light, and then smash proton streams together.

The LHC is being built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It will be around 10 times as powerful as today's champion particle accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.

Its proton collisions will be so forceful that they will mimic conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that scientists believe created the universe. Previously undetected subatomic particles should be released and recorded by the collider. Understanding the new particles should help scientists learn much more about the fundamental nature of the universe.

"What I'm trying to do now is think about techniques of getting information out of all the data," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Princeton, N.J. He is on the faculty of Rutgers University and is a long-term visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

"There's going to be a lot of data, and most analyses that people are planning to do cast very specific hypotheses."

His task is to search for more general ways to extract data.

"Some of the analyses are very specific and sort of narrow," he said, "and I'm a little worried there might be things in the data that might be missed initially."

The LHC will be able to reach into the heart of nature and teach scientists about the origins of mass itself.

For the past 30 years, he said, science has been studying the Standard Model, which attempts to explain many of the basics about the relationships of particles and forces. While this theory works brilliantly, it has some major gaps. It doesn't explain how gravity acts, and it is mathematically inconsistent.

"We don't have any indications in which way the Standard Model is wrong," Thomas said. But mathematically, "it's internally inconsistent."