The world’s biggest annual meeting of physicists gathered yesterday in Paris, and the star attraction was the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest atom smasher.
Being invited to speak at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris is a great honour, and one of the main speakers on the opening day was Irish physicist Ronan McNulty. His team at University College Dublin have played an important role in the LHC project.
Experiment at CERN
The Large Hadron Collider under construction at CERN
For the past six months the LHC at Cern, on the Franco–Swiss border, has been smashing protons together at energies 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun. So this is the first conference to discuss the initial results from the experiment.
This afternoon Dr McNulty gave his paper explaining how his team have “rediscovered” two important particles, the Z boson and the W boson.
These were originally found by physicists in the mid-1980s, but their rediscovery within the data shows that various experiments attached to the LHC are running properly and delivering correct results.
Eventually tens of thousands of computers will be connected together for the scientists to process and analyse the results from CERN.
Team member James Keaveney, a PhD student at UCD, was searching through the data when he spotted the signatures of the Z boson and the W boson.
James and two other postgraduate students from the UCD team, Dermot Moran and Stephen Farry, also visited CERN to see the first data being produced.
One detector at CERN, called the LHCb, has significant Irish involvement. Parts of the device were built at UCD before being installed at CERN.
Higgs boson
The Irish team’s work will help scientists at the LHC as they intensify their hunt for the much more elusive Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs boson has been described as the missing piece that would complete the “Standard Model” describing all the sub-atomic particles and their interactions with one another.
Learn more
Read a quick overview of careers in physics
Find out how Science Ambassador Cormac O’Raifeartaigh became interested in physics and what he studied
View Dr McNulty’s PowerPoint presentation to the conference (you may need a degree in physics to understand it though)
