BIG SCIENCE - ODU

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.


Why do we need Big Science?


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


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


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

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"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


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

Big Science - Henderson10

Quintessential Big Science: Discovery of Higgs Boson, CERN, July 4, 2012

CMS Higgs Publication: ~185 institutions, ~3000 authors (~3600 collaboration members today)


Fermilab July 4, 2012: A

standing room-only crowd

gathered at 2 a.m. … to watch

CERN's broadcast on their latest

Higgs search results.

ATLAS Higgs Publication: ~220 institutions, ~3,000 authors (~5,000 collaboration members today)

Exploring the subatomic world with high precision

Big Science - Henderson12

CEBAF, Jefferson Lab, Virginia

Relativistic

Heavy Ion

Collider,

BNL, New

York

HERA

electron-

proton collider,

DESY

Hamburg

PEP-II Collider, Stanford

LANSCE,

Los Alamos

KEK-B, Super-KEKB

Collider, Japan

CESR Collider,

Cornell Univ.

DAFNE,

Frascati, Italy39 Nobel Prizes in Physics

based on accelerator-driven or

related research

Life and Biological Sciences

Abbott Laboratories:

Kaletra, one of most

prescribed drug in its class

for HIV-AIDS

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


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.


There has been enormous investment in light sources over the last two decades

15

Indus-1Indus-2

SAGALight

Source

FLASHSwissFEL

ELBE


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


DNA Sequencing Factory 1994

Library of the Human

Genome, Wellcome

Collection

Big Science Telescopes have Established our View of the Universe and Cosmology


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


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

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory


LIGO, Livingston LA, 2.5 mile long interferometer arms

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory


Neutron star merger: Thirty-seconds of binary neutron star inspiral as it

appeared in the LIGO detectors. The entire signal lasted 100 seconds and

ranges from 10’s to 100’s of Hz.

Harnessing the Power of the Sun on Earth: Fusion Energy


ITER: International Thermonuclear Experimental

Reactor. Members China, the European Union,

India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United

States.

NIF at Lawrence Livermore

National Lab: World’s largest and

highest energy laser: MJ/pulse,

500 TW peak power

Big Science and COVID-19


Summit

supercomputer

at Oak Ridge

National Lab

Advanced Light Source, LBNL

Crystal structure of

protein

Big Science Policy Debates


1969: Robert Wilson, founding Director

of Fermilab, before Congressional Joint

Committee on Atomic Energy to

discuss Fermilab’s accelerator

When pressed about the importance of

the accelerator to national security, he

answered:

“But it is fruitless to wring one’s hands over the bad effects

of Big Science. [It] is an inevitable stage in the

development of science and, for better or for worse, it is

here to stay. What we must do is learn to live with Big

Science…[making it] flourish without, at the same time,

allowing it to trample Little Science– that is, we must

nurture small-scale excellence as carefully as we lavish

gifts on large-scale spectaculars.”

“It only has to do with the respect with which we

regard one another, the dignity of men, our love

of culture... It has to do with: Are we good

painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean

all the things that we really venerate and honor

in our country and are patriotic about. In that

sense, this new knowledge has all to do with

honor and country but it has nothing to do

directly with defending our country except to

help make it worth defending.”

Particle Physics has been a Driver for Ever More Ambitious Accelerator Concepts


International Linear Collider: 250 to 1000 GeV e+e-

Muon collider

concept (Fermilab)

FCC at CERN: 100 km, 100 TeV

Enrico Fermi’s

Globaltron

(1954)

Can We Make Big Science Small Again?


Revolutionary cryo-EM is taking over

structural biology, Nature, Feb 10, 2020

Accelerator on a chip

Stanford University

Electron beam acceleration to 8 GeV in 20cm laser driven

plasma discharge

(A.J. Gonsalves et al.,PRL 122, 084801, 2019)

Electron Energy (GeV)

1.25 Angstrom resolution protein structure

determination with Cryogenic Electron

Microscopy, Nature, 587, 157 (2020):

Thank You!


Study of the Sociology and Organizational Psychology of Big Science is Itself a Scientific Endeavor


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