The LHC, which took 25 years to plan and build, straddles the French-Swiss border. Today, the LHC is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator and is expected to address the most fundamental questions of particle physics and illuminate the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary particles. All eyes in the physics world then turned to the proposed Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), which drew upon the same principles as the Texas project and conducted its first successful experiment in September 2008. In 1993, however, a cost-wary Congress killed the multibillion-dollar Texas project. It was recognized immediately as being important and got many citations.” “People were talking about the idea years beforehand, but we sealed the deal. “I like to say that our conclusions chose the major parameters of the Superconducting Super Collider, because that’s basically what it came out to be, exactly the machine that we specified,” Lane says. Shortly after, their specifications were adopted for the proposed Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator then being built in Texas that, if finished, would have been triple the size of the competing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) constructed near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007. Lane, Eichten, Quigg, and Hinchliffe were early champions of TeV-scale physics, and in a 1984 issue of Reviews of Modern Physics, investigated the energy range and particle beam density needed to explore the mystery of how particles got their mass. This is a great recognition for Ken, our physics department, and Boston University.” “I was overjoyed to receive the announcement. “As one of the 2011 Sakurai Prize winners, Ken joins some of the most distinguished particle physics theoreticians in the world over the past three decades,” says Andrei Ruckenstein, a BU vice president and associate provost for research. The citation for the award, which will be presented at the APS annual conference next April, reads: “For their work, separately and collectively, to chart a course for the exploration of TeV-scale physics using multi-TeV hadron colliders.” TeV refers to teravolt, or a trillion electron volts. He shares the prize with coauthors Estia Eichten and Chris Quigg of Fermilab, a national laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and Ian Hinchliffe of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics of the American Physical Society, established to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in particle theory. Lane, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of physics, is the recipient of the 2011 J. Then again, the guy who just won the Nobel Prize in medicine is 85 years old, and he won it for in vitro fertilization, which was developed over 30 years ago.” “We started this work 27 years ago,” Lane says with a chuckle. Now, more than 25 years after publication, the paper has been recognized with one of the field’s most important prizes. Photo courtesy of Kenneth Laneįor the past 14 years, the cover to Kenneth Lane’s 1984 paper that helped chart the course for supercollider physics has been hanging on his office door. Twitter Facebook BU physicist Kenneth Lane, seen here in France, was one of the early pioneers of supercollider physics, which eventually led to the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

Supercollider france