The Freelance Bureau: The Big Bang Theories

“We could witness the act of cosmic creation in our labs" -- David Curtin

David Curtin is hunting for hidden particles that could unlock the secrets of the cosmos, from the origins of dark matter to the puzzling weakness of gravity. And he hopes Canada will boldly invest in a project he says could make Toronto a research hub for this new generation of physics.

Curtin is one of the leaders of the proposed Massive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra Stable Neutral Particles (nicknamed MATHUSLA, after the longest-living man in the Book of Genesis). Curtin’s group proposes to build the MATHUSLA detector – a largely hollow structure full of sensors – in the fields above the mammoth subterranean Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Compared to the LHC -- a multi-billion-dollar goliath built to probe high energy particle physics -- MATHUSLA is big science on a budget, a modestly priced initiative to find long-lived particles (LLPs) the collider has missed, and for a fraction of the cost.

“I want to get the public and politicians interested in this project because it represents a unique opportunity for Canada and Toronto,” says Curtin, a University of Toronto physics professor.

“Obviously, we are looking for funding all over the place, but there is this fantasy scenario where Canada says it is going to make this a Canadian project, and then they own it. Wouldn’t that be grand?”

With an estimated price tag in the tens of millions of dollars, the MATHUSLA project already enjoys support by large portions of the scientific community working on high energy particle theory physics, says Curtin.

In recent years, attention has focused on high energy particle physics at the LHC, a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, where subatomic particles are smashed together at near light speed to study what’s created and how it behaves.

In recent years, attention has focused on high energy particle physics at the LHC, a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, where subatomic particles are smashed together at near light speed to study what’s created and how it behaves.

But researchers still not have observed the expected evidence that would confirm basic theories about such things as the origin of ordinary matter, dark matter and the recently discovered Higgs boson – which the media have dubbed “the God particle.”

Curtin and others behind the MATHUSLA project think they are looking in the wrong place. They propose to build a 10,000 square-metre structure about the size of a big box department store above the LHC to observe escaping long-lived particles the collider is not detecting.

They believe the particles they are seeking could allow science to move beyond the boundaries of the Standard Model (SM) of quantum theory into an era of new physics.

“If MATHUSLA could detect and observe these long-lived particles as they decay, it may help solve fundamental mysteries like why gravity is so weak compared to other forces, or the nature of dark matter,” says Curtin.

“We could witness the act of cosmic creation in our labs, an exact replaying of what happened during the Big Bang to create all the matter we are made from.” -- David Curtin

“We could witness the act of cosmic creation in our labs, an exact replaying of what happened during the Big Bang to create all the matter we are made from.”

Curtin is already recruiting U of T engineering professors and students to work on MATHUSLA’s modular design, which would fit together in rows like huge Lego blocks, with sensors perched on top.

He’s also forging ties with the university’s high energy particle physics experimental group, as well as the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

Radiation medicine and the HTTP software that allowed the internet to flourish were among the beneficial spinoffs of earlier high energy particle physics research, Curtin notes.

And linking U of T, Toronto and nearby research centres around a project like MATHUSLA — which can also double as a cosmic ray telescope — could create the kind of scale and synergy that has propelled places like San Francisco to the forefront of high-tech research.

“U of T — and Toronto — has all these resources we can leverage, but all these research clusters need to be interconnected.”

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Related links:

On the hunt for particles that escaped the Large Hadron Collider - U of T Arts and Science

Replaying The Act of Cosmic Creation

The Big Bang Theories