Carleton researcher Manuella Vincter was recently announced as one of the recipients of the 2014 Killam Research Fellowships for her work on the ATLAS experiment, according to a Carleton press release.
The ATLAS project is a particle detector experiment, according to its website.
Vincter said her research team includes four faculty members, six graduate students, and four researchers.
“Our research is actually based at the world’s biggest physics laboratory which is in Geneva, Switzerland, which is where I am now,” she said.
The laboratory she refers to is the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) laboratory, which she said was made popular by references to it in book-turned-movie Angels and Demons.
Vincter said her research involves using the laboratory’s particle accelerator to make protons—subatomic particles—move at the speed of light and smash together.
The principle behind this experiment relates to Einstein’s well-known equation E = mc2, Vincter said.
“By smashing these protons together, we’re creating energy ‘E’, and when you have the energy ‘E’, you can make ‘m’ mass. You start off with protons, and you end up with something totally new that wasn’t there before,” Vincter said.
The ‘c’ in the equation refers to the speed of light in a vacuum.
By conducting this experiment, Vincter said her team is “trying to recreate the Big Bang, in some sense, or about a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.”
“We’re trying to recreate the conditions of the early universe on a very small scale in a laboratory,” she said.
Vincter said this is fundamental research to help better understand the early universe.
“However, because we need to make very specialized equipment to be able to do this, a lot of the things we do actually end up in mainstream everyday life,” she said.
She said the Internet is a good example of this, as a former CERN employee created it in the ’90s as a more effective communication system between scientists in different places.
Vincter said in the course of their research her group came across various challenges that prompted them “to produce new products, ideas, and technologies that could end up being used in everyday life.”
The fellowships are administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
They “support scholars engaged in research projects of outstanding merit and widespread interest in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, engineering and interdisciplinary studies within these fields,” according to a press release.
“They got something like a hundred different applications in totally different areas, and somehow they’re able to look at all these and make decisions in awarding fellowships in various areas—I think that’s really cool,” Vincter said.
Vincter said the whole process of applying for the fellowship started almost a year ago.
She said writing the application for it was hard as the council was considering research projects from several different fields, so she had to write hers to suit readers from various branches.
“That was very challenging as it’s very easy to slip into scientific jargon when you’re writing about the work that you do, so it was actually very good for me, a good exercise,” Vincter said.
