BIG SCIENCE Discovery at the biggest and smallest scales with big instruments and big teams November 19, 2020 Stuart Henderson Governor’s Distinguished CEBAF Professor of Physics, Old Dominion University Director, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
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BIG SCIENCE
Discovery at the biggest and smallest scales with big
instruments and big teams
November 19, 2020
Stuart HendersonGovernor’s Distinguished CEBAF Professor of Physics, Old Dominion University
Director, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Big Science: What Is It? Science that requires…
Big Science - Henderson 2
Big
Instruments
Big
Facilities
Big
International
TeamsBig
Budgets
CMS Detector,
CERN
Human
Genome
Project
Fermilab
A lot has been said about Big Science
…that’s because Big Science is a big, complicated topic
• Much has been said and written about
– Science of Big Science
– History of Big Science
– Sociology and Anthropology of Big Science
– Governance, organization and management of Big Science
– Science of (Big) Team Science
– International Relations and Big Science
• I’m a physicist and a lab director. To the extent I discuss any of these topics, its from the point of view of a physicist and lab director, not a historian, sociologist, public policy expert, etc.
Big Science - Henderson 3
Why do we need Big Science?
Big Science - Henderson 4
Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)
discovered by Charles
Messier, 1773
Whirlpool Galaxy: Hubble telescope (2005)
Higgs Boson
Discovery
(2012) and
subsequent
measurements,
CERN
We need Big Science because in many scientific disciplines the frontiers of knowledge cannot be expanded in any other way
The atomic nucleus
“discovered” by scattering
alpha particles from gold
foil: Geiger, Marsden and
Rutherford, 1908-1913, U.
Manchester
The Birth of Big Science?
• Could one fire a particle into a nucleus to induce a nuclear reaction?
• Rutherford’s experiments used 10 MeV alpha particles from Radium decay
• As the nucleus expelled 10 MeV particles, it made sense that energies higher than 10 MeV would be required to penetrate the nucleus
• In visits to Cavendish, G. Gamow convinced Rutherford that particles of much lower energy – ~300 keV – could penetrate the nucleus of light atoms (“quantum mechanical tunneling”)
• Cockroft and Walton set about designing a 600 kV electrostatic generator
• 1932 they succeeded, producing the first human-made nuclear reaction
proton + 7Li → 8Be → 2
The age of particle accelerators and Big
Science was born!
Cockcroft, Rutherford
and Walton, and the HV
generator
5Big Science - Henderson
Lawrence’s Cyclotrons and the University of California Radiation Lab
Big Science - Henderson 6
Lawrence
and the
Cyclotron,
1930UC Radiation Lab’s staff arranged within and
on top of the magnet of the 60-inch (diameter)
cyclotron, 1939. A “truly colossal machine”.
Lawrence and staff at 184 inch cyclotron; 4,000 ton
magnet; housed in purpose built 160 ft. dia, 100 ft. tall
building completed 1946; accelerated particles to 730 MeV
Manhattan Project and WW-II Research
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Uranium enrichment Alpha 1
Racetrack Calutron
The Electromagnetic Plant (Oak Ridge, TN) produced high-purity U-235 using
calutrons (based on Lawrence’s cyclotron) at industrial scale
Calutron operators at control panels
Rooftop laboratory at MIT
Radiation Lab: development
of radar technologies, 1941
• 1941-1946: Effort during WW-II to design and construct a nuclear weapon
• Brought together many university laboratories and scientists with newly constructed laboratories
in Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford and ~ two dozen other locations, in collaboration with UK
and Canada
• Peak of 130,000 workers, $2B funding (~$25B today)
The Modern Era of Science Policy and Government Supported Scientific Research was Born in 1945
8
"New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.“
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 17, 1944
“The Government should accept new responsibilities for promoting the flow of new scientific knowledge and the development of scientific talent in our youth. These responsibilities are the proper concern of the Government, for they vitally affect our health, our jobs, and our national security.”
- Vannevar Bush, 1945
“This remarkable and prescient report was the guiding force for science and innovation in our country for decades. It led to the development of the modern American research university, the National Science Foundation, and the intellectual architecture for science, engineering, and medical research and higher education in the United States. “
- National Academies, 2020Big Science - Henderson
The subatomic world
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Discovering the subatomic world with particle accelerators
Stanford 2-mile linear
accelerator
Fermilab Main Ring and
Tevatron Collider
PETRA collider,
DESY Hamburg
CERN Super Proton-Antiproton
Synchrotron and Large Hadron Collider
SPEAR collider,
Stanford
Alternating Gradient
Synchrotron, Brookhaven
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Quintessential Big Science: Discovery of Higgs Boson, CERN, July 4, 2012
1997: First Nobel prize from synchrotron radiation
research: structure of Bovine F1 ATP Synthase
Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 2009 (structure of
ribosome) and 2012 (G-protein coupled receptors)
1947: Synchrotron radiation
observed at General
Electric, Schenectady, NY
Advanced Photon Source
(1996)
National Synchrotron Light
Source (1984)
Molecular structure of proteins began to be
solved in late 1950s using x-ray diffraction
13Big Science - Henderson
Materials Science
Connecting mechanical
properties to
microstructure:
Unexpected evolution of
intergranular stresses in
creep deformation
J.C. Shuren, Curr. Opin.
Solid State Mater. Sci. 19,
235 (2015).
Linac Coherent Light Source (2010)
Advanced Light Source (1993)
Spallation Neutron Source (2006)
Discovering limits to Li-ion battery
lifetime: Imaging solid-electrolyte
interphase in Li-ion batteries
D. Eastwood et. Al., Chem. Commun.,
2015, 51, 266..
Identification and study of
topological insulator
properties: first 3D
topological insulator
Bi1-xSbx
D. Hsieh et. al., Nature 452,
970 (2008).
Glimpsing formation of a chemical
bond: probing electronic structure in
the transition state during CO oxidation
on a Ru surface.
H. Ostrom et. Al., Science 12 Feb
2015.
14Big Science - Henderson
There has been enormous investment in light sources over the last two decades
15
Indus-1Indus-2
SAGALight
Source
FLASHSwissFEL
ELBE
15Big Science - Henderson
Human Genome Project (1990-2003)
• World’s largest collaborative biology research project with goal of determining the DNA sequence of the entire human genome within 15 years: 3 B base pairs
• ~2800 researchers involving 20 groups from U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Germany and China; cost of $5B adjusted for inflation
• Multi-disciplinary team required: biologists, bioinformaticists, computational scientists, engineers, physicists
• Sequencing factories were generating DNA sequences at rate of 1000 nucleotides per second 24/7
• New technologies had to be invented to complete the task
“This first genetic blueprint of a human being remains one of humanity’s most important scientific endeavours, laying the foundation for revolutions in genomics, biology and medicine.” – Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK
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DNA Sequencing Factory 1994
Library of the Human
Genome, Wellcome
Collection
Big Science Telescopes have Established our View of the Universe and Cosmology
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GTC Telescope (2006) 10.4m
reflecting telescope, Canary
Islands
Keck Observatory (1996)
10m Mauna Kea, Hawaii
Proposed 30 meter telescope
(TMT Int’l Observatory)
Potsdam Great
Refractor (1899) –
two objective lenses
(80 cm and 50 cm).Vera Rubin Observatory
(under construction) 8.4m,
Chile
• Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Evolution of the universe
• Exoplanets
• Transient events: supernovae
Big Science Telescopes: Cosmic Microwave Background
• The early universe was a white-hot hydrogen plasma, too hot (hundreds of millions of degrees) for atoms to form and so hot that it was opaque to light
• As the universe expanded and cooled, atoms of hydrogen formed, which reach their ground state, and eventually the universe became transparent to light
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Planck European Space Agency observatory:
map of the temperature anisotropies of the
Cosmic Microwave Background showing
fluctuations that are precursors of today’s large
scale structure
Planck
spacecraft
• Expansion of the universe cooled the high-energy radiation into the microwave region; We detect those photons today –the cosmic microwave background