Steve Myers from Belfast heads the accelerator department at the world's largest particle physics centre, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
He is known as the "lord of the rings" and sometimes "Mr Atomsmasher". He also happens to be in charge of one of the most "energetic" places on the planet.
Belfast man Steve Myers heads the department in charge of all the particle accelerators and beams at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research based on the Franco-Swiss border just west of Geneva. CERN is the world's largest particle-physics centre where scientists accelerate protons and ions around huge rings only to smash them together at near light speeds. The impacts produce energy levels last seen moments after the Big Bang that created space-time.
Myers spoke at a major particle-physics conference last week at University College Dublin, which has the only experimental particle physics group in the State.
CERN holds many world records for accelerator impact energies, as measured in electron volts (eV). CERN's LEP collider achieved energies reaching 104 GeV (109eV) and its newest collider the LHC, scheduled to come into service in 2007, will deliver energies of up to 1.5 TeV (1012eV), says Myers.
"The higher in energy you go the closer you go to the moments after the Big Bang," he says. "This will help us understand the forces of nature at that time."
It takes colossal machines to achieve these colossal energies. LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, is a ring-shaped accelerator 27km long. It was tunnelled into bedrock between 100m and 150m underground, and loops under the Jura Mountains at one point. It will cost at least €3 billion before it is finished, says Myers.
The goal in all of this is to use the tiniest of particles travelling at close to the speed of light to produce spectacularly energetic collisions. The colliders use "magnetic lenses" that channel and focus the moving particles in the same way that glass lenses focus light, he says. The LHC particle beam will deliver 370 million joules of energy, equivalent to about 600kg of TNT. Yet the beam will be focused at point of impact down to targets just a few millionths of a metre across, he adds.
"The energy density is absolutely phenomenal. The energy in the collision converts into mass which imitates what happened at the beginning of the universe."
Particle physics is complex, difficult and expensive, making one wonder why we should do it at all, but Myers has none of that. "Why do you do anything that gives us knowledge," he responds. "It is the last pioneering research that can be done in high energy physics."
The search for knowledge can lead to surprising discoveries, he says, pointing to James Clerk Maxwell whose equations unified electricity and magnetism but who never could have predicted mobile phones or television as a result of his work. Nor could the founder of modern nuclear physics, Sir Ernest Rutherford, have predicted nuclear fission achieved in a reactor.
Myers himself couldn't have predicted that he would spend his entire working life in France. He completed a BSc and had almost finished a PhD in electrical and electronic engineering at Queen's University Belfast when he happened to see an ad encouraging scientists to work at CERN.
He eventually got the job and 33 years later is still there, smashing atoms and overseeing CERN's seven accelerators.