UO physicist works on collider.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Imagine a machine so powerful it can hurl objects into each other at just short of the speed of light, creating tiny explosions that release an amount of energy rarely seen in the universe since shortly after the Big Bang.

Now, imagine a scientist from the University of Oregon helping build it.

That's Jim Brau, a UO physics professor and co-leader of the International Collider Project, a worldwide effort to build the most sophisticated atom smasher ever, one that will allow scientists to peer so far back into the genesis of the universe it's become known as "Einstein's Telescope." If all goes well, work on the multibillion-dollar project could begin by 2010 in a location yet to be selected.

If and when the machine gets built, the collisions of electrons and positrons it creates could begin to answer some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos, things such as the structure of dark matter, the existence of extra dimensions and the long-sought unifying "theory of everything."

"It basically comes down to understanding the basic structure of the universe and the fundamental forces at work in the universe," Brau said.

Not surprisingly, the project is one of the biggest undertakings ever by the international science community. Competition for the host site will be fierce, with the United States offering a location near the existing particle cyclotron at Fermilab outside Chicago.

And yet, the collider is virtually unknown outside the community of high-energy physicists. But for universities in a position to be part of the project, it offers not only academic prestige but the opportunity to compete for the tens of millions of dollars pouring into the project each year.

Brau, director of the UO Center for High Energy Physics, just returned from a conference in Colorado where he announced more than $800,000 in new funding for the project, most of which will flow through the UO to collider research groups at other universities. That's on top of the more than $1 million a year in research funding the UO center already receives.

The federal government has been pumping about $19 million a year into the International Linear Collider, an amount expected to increase to $25 million to $30 million in coming years. The project is the top mid-term priority for the federal Department of Energy and also is highly ranked by many of the participating nations in Europe and Asia.

That's a lot of investment for a machine that hasn't even been designed yet and that still is waiting for the green light to actually proceed to construction. Scientists still worry that it could suffer the same fate as the Superconducting Super Collider, a similar project that received $2 billion in funding before it was canceled by Congress in 1993.

Brau, though, is cautiously confident. Unlike the Super Collider, the cost of the ILC will be spread out among many nations, which also strengthens its base of support.

"There's so many positive signs," Brau said. "It just seems inevitable it's going to happen."

The ILC is such a big project in part because it's meant to provide answers to big questions. For example, it could reveal the structure of dark matter, the mysterious substance that, along with dark energy, is believed to make up more than 95 percent of the universe.

Dark matter is important because it presumably provides the mass that keeps things together; if not for dark matter, the Milky Way would fly apart. The ILC could, for the first time, help determine what dark matter is and whether it is formed by a single type of particle or many.

"We're basically starting to interact with and probe and touch the dark part of the universe," Brau said. "And that part of the universe is the overwhelmingly dominant part of the universe."

Collider experiments also could answer questions about how mass is created and distributed through the cosmos, and it could aid in the quest to uncover evidence supporting one of the most far-reaching theories in physics, string theory.

String theory has the potential to be the Holy Grail of science: A theory that unifies the four known forces in the universe - electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity.

And lest the project be seen as no more than a billion-dollar playground for the ultimate geeks, Brau points out that particle physics has not only revolutionized medicine and industry but in doing so also has added far more to the economy than is spent on research. Americans spend more in a year on lawn care than the nations of the world would spend to build the ILC.

"It's really a compelling adventure, and the value to society is huge," Brau said. "Our mission is to uncover the structure of the universe, but there's also tangential value that will come out of this."

The ILC will not be the end of the adventure. For all the energy produced when electrons are slammed into their antimatter counterparts (positrons), it doesn't come close to the amount of energy that existed in the microseconds after the Big Bang.

But by glimpsing the energies such collisions produce, physicists hope to show which of various competing theories match the measured results. In that way, scientists will be able to clear away some of the theoretical chaff and perhaps use Einstein's Telescope to catch their first, dim glimpse of a truly unified universe.

"You have to take it one step at a time," Brau said.