Ask Jeff Wood where the universe came from, and you’re likely to get fruit salad. At least he makes weighty, complex subjects like nuclear physics somewhat understandable for the rest of us.
Wood, 29 years old, recently stopped off in Montville to catch up with his family and get back on U.S. time after working for two months this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, also known as CERN. He was headed back to Lawrence, Kan., where he is working on his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at the University of Kansas (KU).
As a teenager, Wood moved to Montville to live with his father, Michael Wood, but finished his high school years at Ledyard High School. His stepmother is Lorraine Desjardins, daughter of Ellen Desjardin, a Montville Parks and Recreation commissioner.
For three summers, Wood has spent several weeks in Geneva, working with other researchers and students on projects related to the gigantic supercollider known as Large Hadron Collider. The supercollider, set to launch in September, could change our fundamental knowledge of the universe.
According to the university, the CERN supercollider is designed to create conditions that existed in a wisp of time following the “Big Bang” that some say created the universe. Wood and other scientists are searching for answers to questions such as “How does energy work?” and “Why did atoms survive the Big Bang?”
Wood is involved with the world of heavy ion physics. He’s helping to bring online a new detector designed and built at KU, the Zero Degree Calorimeter (ZDC). It will help physicists monitor collisions of particles in the supercollider. Those collisions will occur at 40 million times per second.
The KU research is funded by a U.S. Department of Energy grant.
He described how the supercollider work is centered around a tunnel built underneath the outskirts of Geneva. The tunnel is large, spanning the French-Swiss border, so the researchers are continually crossing international borders to do their work.
“What most people don’t realize is that underneath the ground, about 100 meters [or about 100 yards], there’s a huge ring,” he explained. “This is where the particle beams are.”
The ring is where the two particle beams cross and make a whole bunch of new particles. Wood’s equipment, the ZDC, will “grab” some of those particles.
“You’ve heard that you shouldn’t mix apples and oranges together. We’re smashing apples and oranges together all of the time, to figure out what the universe is all about,” he explained. “We basically are taking two apples, smashing them together, to get oranges, bananas, raspberries, blueberries—a whole fruit salad of stuff. Hopefully, we’ll see particles we’ve never seen before, and they will tell us something new about the
universe.”
As Wood puts it, the harder a couple of atomic particle-sized apples are smashed together, the more “fruit salad” and scientific discoveries.
“The harder you smash those apples together, you might get new particles—like watermelons, cantaloupes—the real big stuff, things we haven’t seen before,” he said.
By “big,” he’s still referring to really small things: pieces of atoms.
Sometimes they smash together whole atoms—technically ions because the electrons have been removed. These are heavy ions, or nuclear physics.
“Nuclear physics has the richest physics in it,” said Wood. “There are a lot of different forces in nature. It basically describes the majority of them. The only one we haven’t been able to figure out on the small scale is gravity.
“Every other fundamental force of nature is something we’ve been able to figure out by utilizing particle beam collisions,” he added.
Wood and others working on the ZDC particle collider hope it will give them insights on particles that react gravitationally strongly enough to show the impact of gravity.
Since last year, Wood’s quest has taken on more personal significance.
His younger brother, David, passed away at age 25. The two were very close. Wood was in Europe when he learned of his brother’s death. David was very much into kinesiology and how it applied to athletes. The loss makes Wood strive harder in his quest. He admits that keeping busy with the project has been a way to cope.
“At least I can feel like enough living can be done for the both of us,” he said. “The work is very exciting, but it also keeps you very busy.”
Music also is a big part of his life. Although he doesn’t have time these days to be in a band, he enjoys escaping to play his guitar, almost daily.
“You can’t do physics all the time, because it will drive you crazy. You need to have other things to do to bring you back into sanity,” Wood said.
“It’s great to have him home for a while,” said his father, Michael, an engineer at EB. “He’s been talking over my head for several years now.”
Wood was born in Lawrence, Kan. It turns out that he lives a few blocks away from the townhouse that his father and his mother lived in. The townhouse is still standing, so on a recent visit, Michael snapped photos of his son in front of it. Wood’s mother, Sandi Shimkus Wood Eilenberger, who lived in Ledyard, passed away in 2004.
While he enjoys the cultural differences of his international experience and describes Switzerland as more laid-back and steeped in history, he likes being home.
“It’s a change of pace,” he admitted. “We have a whole aisle [of the grocery store] dedicated to cereal; they have a whole aisle of wine.”
There’s no shortage of opportunities to hear opinions of others in such a multinational setting.
“You’re supposed to learn that America is not the best when you go somewhere else, but I think it really is,” he said. “I’m very much an American; I feel that every time I come back through Newark Airport and see the ‘Welcome to the United States of America’ [sign]; it feels good to see all the signs in English again, see all the might and the security of our
country.”
There is the potential that Wood may head back to CERN as part of his doctoral studies. For now, it’s back to Kansas to work on his thesis.
For more about the KU research program, go to www.ku.edu; to learn more about CERN, go to http://public.web.cern.ch/Public.