|
For $200 a month, about the cost of a few months of a home Internet connection, Columbia University has purchased a high-speed connection linking Morningside to one of the world's premier atom-smashers at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), a sprawling experimental complex on the Swiss-French border.
What does Morningside need with access to an overseas atom-smasher, you may wonder? The University, of course, already conducts atom-smasher research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island. For several years, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has been generating data to support scientific discoveries in particle physics -- ranging from recreating the subatomic soup that led to the Big Bang, to chasing down the ever-elusive "Higgs" boson, a massive subatomic particle with zero electric charge.
 |
| An aerial image of where the Large Hadron Collider is being completed underground near Geneva, Switzerland. |
But the more data the better when the goal is to spot extremely rare events, explained Gustaaf H. Brooijmans, Columbia's assistant professor of physics. And CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an underground accelerator ring 27 kilometres in circumference, will be the world's highest energy collider when it goes online next year, he said. Indeed, Columbia is now part of CERN's ATLAS experiment to utilize the LHC, one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1,800 physicists -- Brooijmans is one of them -- participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 34 countries.
In preliminary testing of an international computer grid last month, Brookhaven received data from CERN, and now physicists working in labs on the second floor of Pupin will have access to CERN data at the rate of one gigabit per second, without having to get on the Long Island Expressway.
But it was not a physics person who achieved this easy, cost-effective connection to the CERN data. Rather, Columbia's physicists have Alan Crosswell to thank. Crosswell directs network infrastructure for Columbia University Information Technology (CUIT).
Through CUIT's participation in the New York City fiber network, he recently learned that CERN was dropping off three connections at Manhattan Landing, a major Midtown "telecom hotel" that is physically about 20 feet away from equipment owned by Columbia.
When he mentioned it to associate professor of physics Bob Mawhinney and others in the physics department, their ears immediately perked up. It was not long before Morningside had its own connection to fiberoptic cable deep beneath the Atlantic.
"CUIT, through its participation in this New York City fiber network, has positioned the University to easily take advantage of opportunities such as this connection to CERN and other advanced research networks," Crosswell said. |
