Atom-smasher plays role in world's big scientific adventure

University of Auckland physicist Dr David Krofcheck has been honoured with one of the top prizes in science, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, sharing it with a few colleagues… 13,507 of them.

He has had a hand in one of the most exciting projects in science.

The Breakthrough Prize recognises research with the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest smasher of atoms, which has revealed information about the fundamental properties of matter, energy, and the early universe.

New Zealand academics have been involved with the collider at European physics laboratory CERN near Geneva from the construction phase

Krofcheck and Professors Phil Butler, of the University of Canterbury, and his son Anthony Butler, of the University of Otago, helped to ensure the safe functioning of the US$550 million Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector which serves as a giant “camera” recording particle collisions.

Preventing proton beams from going astray allowed data to be safely recorded, enabling the breakthrough discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

“The CMS group consists of thousands of physicists and engineers and its success highlights the cooperative nature of large-scale experiments,” says Krofcheck. “This was a wonderful opportunity for New Zealand to work with world class colleagues and technologies.”

Krofcheck uses the Large Hadron Collider as a time machine to recreate hot and dense nuclear matter from lead-lead ion collisions. These collisions shatter the protons and neutrons inside the lead to produce a "quark gluon plasma" which existed in the early universe.

He works with PhD students around the world to get their lead-lead ion collision data analysed and published in major journals.

“I was able to study fundamental nuclear and particle physics while my Canterbury collaborators used their expertise in radiology to start a medical imaging company in New Zealand,” says Krofcheck.

The company, MARS Bioimaging Ltd, has a point-of-care scanner based on Large Hadron Collider technology. This scanner is approved for patient use in New Zealand for musculoskeletal conditions. In addition, the company has a clinical trial underway in New York ahead of a planned North American product launch later this year.

The $3 million Breakthrough Prize will fund grants for doctoral students to research at CERN.

Now in their 13th year, the Breakthrough Prizes, recognising the world's top scientists, were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.