BY ALEXANDER ROLLE

In print | Published September 18, 2008

This fall, Jamie Saxon ’09 has taken leave of Swarthmore to work at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, a world-leading laboratory for particle physics located in Geneva, Switzerland. Currently, Saxon is working on the ATLAS project, one of the detectors associated with the Large Hadron Collider — the centerpiece of CERN’s research.

In the summer after his sophomore year in high school, Saxon worked at the High Energy Physics lab at the University of Pennsylvania. This was one of the few labs that responded to his e-mails requesting that they take a high school student.

For the next three summers, Saxon worked at the lab, “making prototype electronics or cables and learning about the project,” Saxon wrote in an e-mail interview. The third summer, Saxon, who was by then a Swarthmore student, continued to work on the project in Geneva, “doing somewhat more technical/cerebral work.”

His role at the lab has varied from year to year, and has included “monitoring the temperatures of our detector and help[ing] test cables in the experimental pattern, … [working on] the installation of the patch panels (intermediary piece of the readout system) in the cavern, and work[ing] on timing configuration programs.”

“This summer, I started with database programming, and now I am working on learning more about the data acquisition for the detector, and writing additional programs for this. Basically, my work for the last two years is largely encompassed by the installation and ‘timing’ of the detector,” Saxon said.
On Sept. 10, at 10:28 a.m., a beam in the Large Hadron Collider traveled the entire 27 kilometers of the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. “Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch,” read a CERN press release marking the occasion. “Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.”

Tributes from scientists around the world have been pouring into the European laboratory, which is comprised of 20 member states. The U.S. is one of eight entities that have “observer status.”
Frank Moscatelli, a former professor of Saxon’s, said that while he doesn’t know exactly what kind of role Saxon has at CERN, “they keep inviting him back so they must like him.”

While the research that Saxon is doing is not directly related to Swarthmore or any of the professors here, there are plenty of opportunities for research in physics and other departments that can be had without leaving campus. If majoring in physics, for example, a student is “close to being guaranteed a summer research spot, if they want it,” Moscatelli said. “The vast majority of faculty do scholarly research with students, and students have the opportunity to do it for credit or over the summer … supported by the college or by the professor’s own research funding. Many professors have a lot of outside funding.”

According to Saxon, the most famous objective of the research now being undertaken at the Large Hadron Collider is a search for the Higgs boson, a search which will hopefully reveal new information that could lead to the “completion or reformulation” of the Standard Model for Physics. Saxon compared the Standard Model to the Periodic Table of the Elements: “It describes the building blocks and the forces that constitute the universe in a relatively concise and largely encompassing manner … you can build nearly everything in the universe mathematically out of this model.” The model isn’t perfect, however. The most obvious problem is that it cannot explain why anything in the universe has mass. A proposed solution to this gap in the model is the Higgs Boson, which is the only Standard Model particle that hasn’t been proven to exist, as it has never been observed.

“The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] will serve to recreate energies (in an extremely small space) that may mirror the interactions that we saw back at the very beginning, immediately after the Big Bang, giving us clues to the origins of forces and particles as we see them today,” Saxon said.

Brig Williams, the Coordinator of Front End Electronics, ATLAS Experiment and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania said of Saxon: “He’s fairly unusual. Jamie is particularly talented and broad in his interests. He’s made it easy for us to give him a wide range of responsibilities.”

Saxon spent his junior year at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. In addition to the physics and math he’s studied, he’s an honors major in political science.

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