A TEAM of Irish scientists are in Paris this morning to tell a major international scientific conference that they have “rediscovered” two important sub-atomic particles.
Their discovery was made at Cern, the European centre for nuclear research. It is home to the most powerful atom smasher in the world, the 27km-long Large Hadron Collider.
It started spewing out data before Christmas and, since then, the University College Dublin team, led by Dr Ronan McNulty, has been searching through the streams of information looking for two elusive particles.
Then about three weeks ago, PhD student James Keaveney got the first inkling he had discovered what the team was looking for – two sub-atomic particles called the Z boson and W boson.
It took some weeks of checking and also clearance by Cern officials before they received confirmation that indeed they had identified the first of these particles produced by the collider.
Dr McNulty will reveal the details of their work this afternoon at the 35th International Conference on High Energy Physics.
It is the largest meeting of particle physicists in the world and this year’s event in Paris has attracted 1,000 delegates. “The big highlight of the conference is the Cern data because this is the first time it has been presented,” Dr McNulty said yesterday.
He described how he and his team had spend four or five years preparing for the start-up of the collider, then the “hoping and hoping” that important data would emerge.
“And then a student comes into your office and says ‘I think I have found something’.”
Mr Keaveney knew what to look for when you smash two protons together at such speed and with such force that the point of collision becomes 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun. The problem was he had only simulations to study before.
“When you spend a few years looking at simulations and then see the real thing, it is fairly exciting,” said Mr Keaveney who hopes to complete his PhD next year.
These particles were first discovered by Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, an accomplishment that won them the Nobel Prize for physics in 1984. And while the Irish team won’t expect to capture a second prize, they do have the satisfaction of having used Irish-designed software to search for and then produce pictures of the Z and W bosons.
The software helped Mr Keaveney find the “distinctive signal” given by the bosons. He had to isolate the data and then make a picture of the collisions to be sure they were the real thing.
“Once we saw it, all of us were convinced immediately it was a Z,” he said. “It was a great moment to get that picture out.”