March 30, in an underground tunnel near the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), has successfully conducted the proton collisions, reaching an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts. Particle physicists from all over the world focused their attention on the experiment and rejoiced over the satisfactory result. Taiwan, of course, is part of it. Research teams from Academia Sinica, National Central University, and National Taiwan University have already contributed to the historic project for years.

 

The world’s largest physics machine, LHC, is designed to accelerate protons up to nearly the speed of light to generate energy by crashing them. Four detectors will record the process and detect the new particles produced from the collisions. The purpose is to trace back to the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, whose visage still remains unveiled to modern physicists.

 

Among the four detectors, CMS detector contains a sub-detector called “Preshower”, whose construction techniques are supported by our research team led by Professor Yuan-Hann Chang (張元翰) and Professor Tsung-Tai Lin (林宗泰) of Department of Physics.

 

Taking advantage of Taiwan’s renowned semiconductor industry, Professor Chang began to design the detector along with the participation of Industrial Technology Research Institute, and eventually came into being a semiconductor detector with 2-meter diameter, composed of 4,000 silicon sensors.

 

During the experiment, the Preshower sub-detector is the first sub-system to observe the events: over 200 thousand collisions were recorded within the first hour. By analyzing the data, the research team is able to recreate the moments of collisions in 3D images. All the data is stored in CERN computers and then distributed to physicists to conduct further research work.