October 10, 2025 - 1:00pm
Subatomic particles whizz around a 17-mile underground track in Geneva, Switzerland. Every second, hundreds of millions of protons collide with each other, showering into even smaller short-term particles. Out of these perpetual interactions, only one in one billion will produce functional data. Researchers from all over the world hope the rare explosions will reveal new ideas about our universe, uncovering mysteries about black holes, dark matter and energy.
Far from home, Eric Torrence, a physics professor at the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences, will spend the next year and a half being the ATLAS Run Coordinator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). After being elected to the position fall 2024, Torrence ensures the largest particle accelerator in the world continuously produces usable data from May 2025 to July 2026.
“I get called at any time in the day or night if something breaks or isn’t running properly,” he says. “It's really a 24/7 job.”
The UO has been a part of the Atlas Experiment since 2000, an international collaboration between physicists, engineers, and students. With about 3,000 people involved and around 40 universities, anyone included in the experiment has access to CERN’s particle accelerator to collect data and make physics breakthroughs.
The accelerator will operate nonstop for the duration of Torrences reign as coordinator, sending information to colleges and other researchers. Machines like these are extremely expensive to run. According to Forbes, the annual operating cost surpasses $1 billion.
“If you can’t take data, that's a real problem,” he says. “We stress out if we are missing out on data for 5 to 10 minutes, if it is off for a couple hours, that's a real crisis.”
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of 11 accelerators at the facility. Almost 500 feet underground, the 17-mile tunnel circles a suburb of Geneva. Lined with superconducting magnets, the tunnel launches subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light creating the highest impact possible.
“The idea is, building bigger machines has allowed us to collide particles with more force,” Torrence says. “This gives a higher chance of a reaction and a greater possibility to discover new things.”
These particle accelerators help scientists refine what is known as the “standard model of particle physics.” Initially developed in the early 1970s, the model describes the fundamental particles and forces that make up the universe.
The standard model suggests everything is made up of two categories of “elementary particles.” The first is Fermions, which make up all the matter, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. These subatomic particles can be broken down into even smaller building blocks which are known as quarks and leptons. According to The Guardian, a quark is 43 billion-billionths of a centimeter, which is the smallest observable particle.
The second is the bosons, which carry out the forces for the tangible particles. Although a more abstract concept, bosons are constantly in action. Such as photons which carry out electrogenic waves that emit light.
Colliding protons, neutrons, and electrons with the most force possible will break them apart, and detectors in the accelerators will pick up on the cascading of the elementary particles.
As technology advances, new particles are being revealed. In the 1980’s, proton collisions in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a four-mile-long accelerator at CERN, found the particle responsible for radioactive decay. 12 years later, a proton collider in Chicago revealed the largest known subatomic building block.
In 2012, possibly the biggest “new physics” breakthrough occurred at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider. Researchers from the Atlas Experiment discovered the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for giving mass to all matter in our universe. Prior to the discovery, physicists were unsure why different particles had different masses. Peter Higgs and François Englert both received Nobel prizes for their theoretical work in the discovery.
Not only was this a massive discovery in understanding how our world acquires mass, but it was a giant step in uncovering the presence of dark matter and energy.
Over the next year and a half, the LHS collider will run 24 hours a day, but Torrence says they will only receive data that could lead to discoveries 10 to 20 times. “It’s extremely rare to find a reaction that gives us breakthrough data,” he says.
Torrence and the other 3,000 physicists worldwide working through the Atlas Experiment are seeking the next big “new physics” discovery in the double Higgs boson. It is hypothesized that the particle has the capability to couple with itself.
Although they have yet to convincingly see a “double Higgs event,” Torrence suggests that more data will reveal the elusive entanglement.
“With enough data we can measure how strong the Higgs boson couples to itself,” he says. “This would verify, not only that its responsible for all the other particles masses, also couples according to its own mass.”
Upon finding the fused particles, physicists can identify the existence of particles, forces, new states of matter, and possibly even dimensions that extend our understanding beyond the limits of the Standard Model.
—By Leo Brown, College of Arts and Sciences