U.S. Completes $531M Contribution to Large Hadron Collider Project

LHC operations are expected to yield greater understanding of particle behavior under circumstances that cannot currently be observed. Accelerating and colliding particles with the energy concentrations generated within the LHC may reveal a great deal about the origin and nature of mass, dark matter, dark energy, and anti-matter, and could lead to the development of a unified theory of universal forces. The accelerator will be the largest collider on Earth and will tap a distributed computer network that will represent the world’s most powerful supercomputer. For the next 15 years, the anticipated lifetime of the project, LHC is expected to be the leading center for research in high-energy physics.

The LHC accelerator was originally conceived in the mid-1980s as a continuation of the work done at CERN’s Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), though that installation had not even begun operations. The project would create new research opportunities not possible at LEP and other colliders by employing two beams of protons in order to produce the highest possible collision energies and intensities. CERN gave its first approval for the project in 1994. In the next few years, a number of non-CERN observer states, such as Japan, India, Russia and Canada, signed on to provide financial contributions in exchange for participation in research. The U.S. signed such an agreement in December 1997 and, in addition to financial support, agreed to provide a number of components for the accelerator.

This month’s announcement concludes the U.S. LHC Accelerator Construction Project (LACP), a $200 million portion of the U.S. contribution funded through the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. LACP engaged scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in constructing magnets, feed boxes and absorbers for the project. Although the LHC project itself will focus on advances in basic research that are several steps removed from commercializable applications, the construction effort has already led to advances in these technologies at the participating laboratories and at private U.S. companies, which supplied more than $88 million to the project. Other LHC construction efforts have involved 94 universities and laboratories in 30 U.S. states.

U.S. participation in LHC research is managed through the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP), which has been funded since 2004. That program currently includes scientists from the three LACP laboratories and the University of Texas at Austin. Although the accelerator itself is in Switzerland, the LHC distributed computer grid has been designed to allow access to LHC resources from other locations. Fermilab and Brookhaven will each have real-time round-the-clock access to LHC data. Other universities and labs have access to LHC data and collaborations through the Open Science Grid computing centers, which are funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.