Students blog from European physics lab

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

Six graduate and undergraduate students from Rice are blogging about their experiences during internships this summer at the massive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. The students are giving firsthand accounts of their work on different aspects of the particle accelerator, the world’s largest and most expensive science experiment.

Located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the French-Swiss border, the LHC measures 27 kilometers around and has a whopping price tag of $8 billion. Built in an underground ring of tunnels, the accelerator will smash together beams of protons traveling close to the speed of light to recreate conditions that last existed when the universe was less than one-trillionth of a second old.

Physicists will gather information from colliding beams in hope of answering some longstanding questions about the fundamental makeup of the universe. Rice’s team members are all working on the LHC’s 13,000-ton Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the detector systems that will gather information at the LHC.

“When we were first told to consider writing a blog entry for the ‘US LHC Blog,’ none of us really thought much of the idea,” Rice’s team wrote in their initial post June 24. “However, after having discussed it together a little more seriously, we figured that if we could all contribute our fair share, it would not only be rewarding but also further the cause of helping people understand what it is that makes these massive physics experiments (like the Compact Muon Solenoid) tick.”

The bloggers are Lovett College juniors Elie Amram Bengio and Robert Brockman II and senior Diego Caballero; Wiess College senior Patrick El-Hage; and graduate students Jafet Morales and James Zabel. To read their bios, visit http://tinyurl.com/ndo3zl.

To read the team’s blog, visit http://blogs.uslhc.us/?author=19.