Subatomic Photography, in an American Physicist’s Playground

We pull up to an unmarked warehouse in a grassy field. The sun is setting, and the absurdly huge silhouette of Mont Blanc looms over the horizon. Dressed in ripped khakis and a tattered black t-shirt, Phil Harris adjusts his pinstriped fedora with one hand while handling the steering wheel with his other. Wisps of golden facial hair sprout in sporadic clumps, an affliction he describes as the curse of WASPs. He halts the car at the monolithic white gate blocking our progress.

“For the biggest science project ever,” says my driver, “the security isn’t that tight.” He produces a key card, instructing me to run out of the car and wave it at a blinking sensor. The gate slides open noiselessly, Phil pilots his tiny grey Renault through the gate to a trailer elevated atop cinder blocks, and we’re in.

This unassuming industrial zone amidst the rambling French countryside houses an entry point into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer tunnel complex beneath the Jura Mountains spanning the Franco-Swiss border. Phil, a third-year PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a young but vital member of the international team that runs this $8 billion project, the largest international cooperative effort in scientific history.

Phil’s job at CERN – the giant particle physics lab that oversees the LHC project and is perhaps best known as the birthplace of the World Wide Web – is like being the tiny screw that holds everything together in a town-sized Rube Goldberg contraption. The project is one of unprecedented scale and ambition, but Phil breaks down its concept into elegant simplicities. The Large Hadron Collider, he says, is an extremely large machine designed to manipulate the tiniest of all things, subatomic particles – the building blocks of the miniscule atoms which comprise every bit of physical matter in the known universe.

In the most basic terms, according to Phil, the LHC serves two functions: to recreate the primordial conditions of our universe by forcing subatomic particles to race around its circular tunnel complex and crash into one another, and to document these collisions for study and analysis that will hopefully afford scientists at CERN the chance to prove longstanding theories like extra dimensions, dark matter and antimatter. At stake is the future of physics itself: if the LHC can prove these theories, the system of physics as scientists have been constructing it since the days of Albert Einstein is on the right track. If not, everything we know about the laws of physics could be wrong.

In order to document the fleeting phenomena CERN researchers hope to study, Phil says, the LHC acts somewhat like your average digital camera, snapping images with its particle physics detectors in the hopes of capturing ephemera that might appear at any moment. The practical issues of this subatomic photography quickly become obvious: these images must be of much, much higher resolution than the ones your pocket camera takes, and require an astronomical amount of computing power. The LHC must furthermore capture these images at a rate of one every few milliseconds, resulting in a digital deluge that’s the equivalent of “an internet’s worth of data every day,” by Phil’s estimate. To confront this barrage, CERN has spent years setting up the LHC Computing Grid, a gigantic network of tens of thousands of computers spread across nearly 150 locations around the world. This is where Phil and his grad student colleagues enter the scene.

Phil and his team have built a database to organize and maintain the thousands of computer cables that will carry data from the collider through CERN’s onsite computers, which will then speedily transmit the data to the global Computing Grid for analysis. Each cable must be labeled, checked and rechecked repeatedly; if one goes out, floods of data could be lost, so the hunt begins for Phil and his team to track down the faulty connection using diagnostic software he wrote. Without Phil’s contributions, there can be no data and no analysis – in other words, no point.

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The trailer’s interior is filled with solemn scientists who analyze strange graphs and long lines of code on their computers. Phil makes greetings and introductions, and tosses me a hardhat. (He dons his backwards.) You can’t enter the lab without one, he tells me: a project with moving parts this big has great potential for falling objects. As we turn to leave, a young American student accosts Phil for programming assistance. Phil frowns at the computer screen and makes some quick changes with rapid keystrokes, admonishing the student with advice like a knowing instructor. The student squints silently at Phil’s changes for a brief moment, then nods appreciatively, remarking to me that the grad students at CERN often look up to Phil for advice. Phil shrugs off this allegation and ushers me out of the trailer.

“It never ends,” he says as we make our way toward the warehouse. “If you weren’t here I’d probably be stuck working past midnight.” During a normal week, Phil works about 80 hours for a salary well below the Swiss average (median annual income totaled roughly 60,000 Swiss francs for foreign nationals in 2006, according to figures published by Switzerland’s Federal Statistics Office). The decline of the dollar in recent years also hurts; since he is employed as a researcher through a US government grant, the exchange rate factors into his salary. Physics is not a lucrative industry for young American expatriates.

Regaining his upbeat demeanor, Phil directs me to a freight elevator and announces that we’re descending to the tunnels. He talks excitedly throughout the tour, tracing out his niche in this complex project. In a frigid room lined endlessly with grids of rack-mounted Dell computers, he gestures toward the countless masses of cables spilling through the floor like blue vermicelli and points out that he documented each one. He pokes his head into blast doors adorned with radioactive symbols and signs declaring “DANGER: LASER,” explaining the function of every machine we pass. Running up long ladders beside the hulking magnetic rings of the Compact Muon Solenoid detector (CMS) – one of two main detectors in the LHC – he shouts through the metallic catwalks at other figures above and below us, making long-distance introductions. Everyone we encounter seems to know Phil. For a young grad student whose job has mostly been to maintain data cables, he has made his presence an important one at CERN. “For a year I had to go on ‘cable shifts,’” he says, “which basically involves yelling at Russian construction workers to make sure they were connecting the cables correctly.” More recently he has given major talks at science conferences, including one on calibrating the CMS this past July.

Phil takes pride in his ability to work with almost anybody. “The Italians speak to me in Italian now,” he says more than once during our tour. “Sometimes they forget I don’t speak Italian, but I’m starting to be able to understand them more and more.” At such an internationally diverse workplace, he is an exemplar of multicultural cooperation. A longtime Europhile, Phil is an avid traveler and linguistic hobbyist who dreamt of moving to Europe during college at the California Institute of Technology, but his schedule was too intense to study abroad at that point. When the opportunity arose to apply for a grant to work at CERN, he tackled it with fervor even though it meant possibly taking extra time to complete his PhD.

The PhD may take a while. Progress with the LHC has slowed after a series of engineering mistakes resulted in explosions in the tunnels during the accelerator’s first activation this past September, threatening to delay the project by several months. Phil remains zen about this development – the LHC’s third major delay – saying that it will allow his team extra time to recheck their work before the next activation. But, he adds, “I don’t want to be a PhD student forever.”

Still, Phil has high hopes for the project. “I think the LHC will at least force people to look for new discoveries,” he says of its future legacy, which he believes may contribute to important future scientific advancements. “For example,” he explains, “current developments in nuclear fusion come from discoveries made in particle physics 50 years ago.” He draws inspiration from these big ideas; otherwise, he says, it’s easy to get bogged down building theory upon untested theory. One of the main discoveries CERN researches hope to make is the Higgs boson, a hypothetical subatomic particle that might possess properties like those of black holes. Phil’s new job once the LHC is finally activated will be to analyze the behavior of related W and Z boson particles in an effort to locate the more elusive Higgs boson.

“I think there’s the potential for practical applications,” Phil says excitedly of his upcoming research. “There’s a very small chance that the LHC experiments could lead to the possibility of harnessing black holes for energy,” he speculates, riffing off Steven Hawking’s theory that black holes are sources of energy from other universes. “Let’s say we could create black holes stably – then we could solve all the world’s energy problems.”