{"id":119032,"date":"2020-05-20T14:34:13","date_gmt":"2020-05-21T00:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=119032"},"modified":"2020-08-07T11:18:14","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T21:18:14","slug":"grant-high-energy-colliders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2020\/05\/20\/grant-high-energy-colliders\/","title":{"rendered":"UH<\/abbr> physicist awarded grant to develop instrumentation for high-energy colliders"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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From left: Gorham and his students, Christopher Campos, Liem Nguyen, Manuel Olmedo, and Corbett Sonoda, prepare a portion of the detector system before inserting it into the particle beam at SLAC. Photo credit: Christian Miki<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The world’s largest particle colliders rely on ultra-precise position location for particle “debris” that result from each collision of high energy protons in the center of their detectors. Positions are measured precisely in 3D<\/abbr>, however, in recent years particle physicists have been investigating what is being called the “timing frontier”—the problem of adding precise time measurements to the 3D<\/abbr> information, creating 4D<\/abbr> tracking of the particle collision.<\/p>\n

Professor of physics Peter Gorham<\/strong> at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy<\/a> has been one of the particle physicists working on the timing frontier. His work was recently awarded a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for $350,000 to further develop instrumentation for picosecond (one one trillionth of a second) timing of particle collisions.<\/p>\n

As particle physicists look to future colliders with much higher energies, they are realizing that 3D<\/abbr> information will not be enough to deal with the vast increase of secondary particles produced in higher energy colliders. Until recently, 3D<\/abbr> position information has been adequate to determine the necessary information about the collision.<\/p>\n

“In three dimensions, we can pin the track of a secondary charged particle to fractions of a millimeter, but for many years our timing precision on these tracks has been a hundred times worse than this, in terms of the light-travel time of the particle,” Gorham said.<\/p>\n