84 k7 The Secret L$ ofNature
To find their sneaky rntity, Lederman and his fellow physicists have
come up with no better system than to rev up their colliders to attack
atoms with ever more powerful artillery, hoping thus to produce more
particlessleptons, squarks, gluinos, photinos, zinos, and winos-
whose mass, spin, charge, and family relations they can then catalogue
along with the particle's lifetime and the product of its decay.
All of this has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, half a billion alone
for an accelerator at Fermilab. Fermilab's collider-detector facility,
known as CDF, lavishly housed in an industrial hangar painted blue and
orange, was designed to accommodate a five-thousand-ton detector
instrument. It took two hundred physicists and as many engineers
more than eight years to assemble what Leon Lederman, one of its dis-
tinguished directors, describes as a ten-million-pound Swiss watch, the
electric bill for which runs to more than ten million dollars a year.
By the 1990s the CIIF was employing 360 scientists as well as stu-
dents from a dozen universities and national and international labs and
was equipped with ~oo,ooo sensors, including scintillation counters,
organizers, and filters. A special computer was designed to sort
through the atomic debris, programmed to decide which of the hun-
dreds of thousands of collisions each second are "interesting" or im-
portant enough to analyze and record on magnetic tape. In one
millionth of a second the computer must discard, record, or pass data
into a buffer memory to make way for the next item. Data encoded
in digital form and organized for recording on magnetic tape at the
rate of ~oo,ooo collisions per second in 199-91 were expected to in-
crease to a million collisions per second some time later in the 1990s.
Already the system stores close to a billion bits of information for
each event: in a full run the information stored on magnetic tape is
equivalent, as reported by its director, to five thousand sets of the
Encyclopedia Britannica. It then takes a battalion of highly skilled and
motivated professionals armed with powerful workstations and analy-
sis codes two or three years, says Lederman, to do justice to the data
collected in a single run.
The primary task of these Higgs field players is, of course, to locate
the ball they're supposed to be playing with. To accomplish this ap-
prentice sorcerer's mirage they envisaged an even more powerful col-