From a Physics Frontier
TIM ANDEEN, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Physics
Our particle physicist provides a dispatch from Geneva, Paris and the frontlines of world-changing research.
This past year, I’ve been working in Geneva at CERN, home of the world’s most powerful particle collider, where we’re searching for exotic new particles, such as dark matter.
Our detectors, including the ATLAS detector that I use, were originally designed to search for particles in the very center, shortly after collisions. But theorists predict dark matter particles – if they exist – might actually travel several centimeters or meters from the center before we can detect them. So we recalibrated our equipment and changed our algorithm to look for particles at different times and places. We still haven’t spotted new dark matter particles, but we’re continuing to refine our techniques and will keep searching.
This spring, I’m in Paris at the Université Paris-Saclay, where I’m helping set up a robotic system for testing a new chip design that will allow us to collect ATLAS data far more rapidly than before. Because it’s an entirely new custom chip, we need to test each one to make sure it performs perfectly. Our Texas-designed chips could be a crucial component in the technology that finally unveils dark matter particles. There are 80,000 of them, far too many to test manually, so instead we’ll use robots at UT Austin and Université Paris-Saclay. And in the meantime, I will experience the joie de vivre in Paris!
