In the upcoming year, University of Wisconsin researchers will potentially join other scientists in declaring a groundbreaking discovery from research that looks to confirm the existence of a particle known as the “God Particle.”

The research is underway in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, located on the Swiss-French border, with dozens of UW scientists currently working there. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator and is essentially a 17-mile racetrack on which particles are accelerated to faster and faster speeds until they collide.

UW physics professor Wesley Smith works at the LHC and said there are problems with the Standard Model, which has been used for decades to describe how particles interact and behave.

He said the “God Particle” would fill in a crucial gap that currently exists in the Standard Model.

“The model cannot be used to calculate or predict the masses of any of the fundamental particles – not of the electron, muon or quarks that make up the proton,” he said. “The so-called ‘God Particle’ or Higgs particle provides a manifestation of the field with which all particles interact and thereby acquire mass. Finding the Higgs particle establishes the presence of the field.”

He said scientists are expecting that the discovery of the “God Particle” will be the missing piece of the current model and that the role of the researchers is to search through the debris that is formed after the collisions of the particles with detectors to look for new particles.

Francis Halzen, a UW physics professor, said having UW researchers involved in a project like this is unique.

“Big science is routinely done at government-funded national laboratories. UW is one of the last universities in the U.S. where one can still participate in big science,” he said. “This is made possible by a large pool of technical expertise and by excellent facilities for designing and constructing high-tech instrumentation, in the Department of Physics and the Physical Sciences Laboratory in Stoughton.”

Smith has been working on this project since 1993 and served as the Compact Muon Solenoid trigger project manager for 13 years. The CMS is one of the two large all-purpose experiments at LHC. He led the design and construction of the trigger system, reducing the input rate of a billion proton interactions every second by a factor of about 10 million to 300 per second.

For the last five years he has served as CMS Trigger Coordinator. With this job he has the responsibility of deciding which information coming from the detector is kept for analysis.

In addition to contributing researchers to the project, many parts used for research, including intricate computer boards, were built on the UW campus in Chamberlin Hall. This equipment is used to decide which of the 100,000 particle collisions that occur are worth capturing.