After years of planning, a BU physicist looks forward to testing her theories at Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider this summer.
Haley Bridger
Veronica Sanz, a research scientist in Boston University’s physics department, was one of six young theoretical physicists given a $15,000 award this year that will fund her research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator with a 27-kilometer circumference at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is expected to begin operations this spring as the world’s largest and most powerful accelerator. Physicists will use the accelerator to smash together protons moving near the speed of light to learn more about dark energy, dark matter, and extra dimensions.
BU physicist Veronica Sanz gets set for the start-up of the world’s biggest particle accelerator. (Credit: Johannes Hirn)
Sanz recently spoke with Nature Network Boston about her upcoming European commute, the excitement surrounding the start-up of the behemoth collider, and the future of particle physics.
What does the start-up of the LHC mean for the field?
The LHC is the most exciting thing going on in particle physics. Do you know how many years we have been waiting for an experiment like this to come out? [Theoreticians and experimentalists] can’t sit around forever with pen and paper. The particle physics community needed a big push like this one to keep momentum going and to test theory. We are finally going to see real science and data.
The LHC could give us the ability to understand the origin of mass. One possible explanation is the Higgs boson [a particle that may give other particles mass], but there are other explanations as well. As a theoretical physicist, I come up with possible signals to look for.
What sorts of experiments will you be involved with at the LHC?
My work is relevant to the two general-purpose detectors at the LHC: ATLAS and CMS. ATLAS and CMS will record measurements on the particles created in the collisions. They will measure the particles’ identity, path, and energy. My work is to match these measurements with predictions from models of new physics [beyond the Standard Model].
How much trans-Atlantic traveling will you be doing and how much time will you spend at a time in Geneva?
Right now, I spend two or three months a year traveling. Thanks to the award I’ll be traveling twice a year to Geneva, instead of once. Probably, I will spend one month at CERN and another month at U.S. institutions.
Why did you choose to study particle physics?
There are many areas of physics that you can go into. But particle physics is the most beautiful. It’s the very end of the line, the last frontier in our understanding of nature. When you look through a microscope under higher power, you can see smaller and smaller components of life. Particle physics looks at the last and smallest components.
What does the future of U.S. particle physics look like?
Right now, the U.S. has a strong presence in particle physics and in the LHC. But the U.S. and the U.K. have recently cut funds for the next big project, the International Linear Collider (ILC). The LHC will give us a rough picture, but the ILC will give us a clearer image. For the next 10 to 15 years we will be busy with the LHC. But these types of machines are so huge and expensive that we are planning 20 years out. We need longstanding budgets to do this. We don’t know what will happen to the ILC and to the future of the field.