About the US/LHC Project

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland is opening new vistas on the deepest secrets of the universe, stretching the imagination with newly discovered forms of matter, forces of nature, and dimensions of space. This site provides general information about the Large Hadron Collider and detailed information about American participation in the LHC accelerator and experiments. U.S. LHC participation is supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers). This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. (Courtesy: CERN)

Home > LHC Lunch > Jake Searcy

LHC Lunch

Meet Jake Searcy

Quick Facts

Age: 26
Status: Grad Student
Home Institution: University of Oregon (with funding from BNL)
Home Town: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Years at CERN: ~2
CERN Affliation: ATLAS

Going to the moon of our time

Jake Searcy seemed relaxed and content amid the cafeteria’s chaos of people, plates, cashiers and conversation. He told me over the bustle that he particularly enjoys sitting down to talk about “big picture stuff” sometimes because, working at CERN, “it’s easy to get lost in the details.”

The Large Hadron Collider, he said, is “kind of like going to the moon of our time.” After hearing about the machine while in high school, when it was just being built, Searcy decided he wanted to be part of that endeavor and do high-energy physics.

“I've always imagined the space race as this giant undertaking that inspired a generation of people to go explore,” he said. Now, instead of space, “the frontier is this giant project being built by the entire world in order to understand the fundamental questions about how the universe works.”

Searcy was in his first year of grad school in 2008 when, shortly after the LHC began collisions, faulty connections between superconducting magnets caused damages that took more than a year to fix. The delay made the machine’s new start in 2009 coincide with Searcy’s arrival at CERN. “Conveniently, they decided to wait for me,” he joked. He works at CERN on behalf of the University of Oregon, with funding from Brookhaven National Laboratory.

He began studying the top quark with a group in ATLAS just as hints but no definite signal of the elusive subatomic particle began to appear in the LHC. Scientists at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago discovered the top quark to much fanfare in 1995, so the group knew it was there. But it remains one of the more difficult Standard Model measurements to do, Searcy said. Looking for the top quark requires the use of all the hardware and detectors in ATLAS and plenty of software, too. “Not only does all the equipment have to work, but so do all the algorithms,” he said.

Finally, after inspecting data from about 500 particle collisions, his roughly 200-member group officially observed the particle for the first time at the LHC. Their 2010 paper became a flagship publication, demonstrating the collider’s ability to validate previous Standard Model measurements.

Searcy remembers the moment he finally posted a link to the paper on his Facebook page. “Lots of people said congrats,” he said. “But I’m not sure if they really read it.” He was happy and proud all the same.

Now the ATLAS experiment sees 23 times the amount of top quarks than the Tevatron did in runs, because it operates at such higher energy -- 7 TeV versus 1 TeV. “It’s been an interesting journey from not seeing anything to this point,” Searcy said. The original 200 people from his group have since branched out to work on refining measurements and studying details of the particle.

Searcy is getting ready to publish his second paper about the top quark. This time the process is intimate: He knows where all the numbers come from and feels confident writing from the perspective of having just completed the analysis the previous week. So far, he’s composed about half of the text himself, though 14 people in all contributed to the work.

Not only has Searcy played a larger role in the analysis this time, he has also helped collect the data. When he’s not working on a new result or programming software for the experiment, Searcy serves his time in the control room as shift leader.

He prefers this supervisory role to monitoring a specific operation. “It’s fun because you really know what’s going on,” he said. “It’s nice to see how everything fits together. That’s what we’re all here for anyway.”

—Amy Dusto