Greg Landsberg's search for extra dimensions is attracting attention within the physics world and against the backdrop of a public that is fascinated by the ideas of poking through to extra dimensions and black holes.
If scientists find extra dimensions, they might solve the parking problem, assistant professor Greg Landsberg likes to say with a deadpan look.
Really, though, if extra dimensions do exist, the discovery would be the greatest since we learned the earth is not flat, he said.
Landsberg's search for extra dimensions is attracting attention within the
physics world and against the backdrop of a public that is fascinated by the
ideas of poking through to extra dimensions and black holes.
"We have a method of looking and the first results from data," Landsberg said.
"The results are still negative, but very promising in that they show our
sensitivity to the size of the extra dimensions."
If there are extra dimensions, Landsberg and others believe they would be
curled, with a radius smaller than 1 mm, but still large enough to have an
effect on gravity that could be measured.
Landsberg looks for evidence of extra dimensions by smashing protons and
antiprotons together in the world's largest particle accelerator at the U.S.
Department of Energy's Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. Landsberg sits at the
accelerator's DZero detector, where scientists try to detect particles
resulting from the collisions.
To prove the existence of extra dimensions, the scientists were looking for
increased gravitational interaction between pairs of photons produced during
collisions.
Although they found no such increased gravity, they did show that they were
able to set stricter limits on the size of the dimensions than those set by
other experiments.
Still, Landsberg remains energized by the possibility of extra dimensions. More
experiments in the accelerator will be conducted next year. If they fail to
detect extra dimensions, then additional experiments will be conducted at an
even higher-energy accelerator under construction at the CERN lab on the border
of France and Switzerland near Geneva. The collider is being funded by a group
of 15 countries and is to be completed in about six years.
"It's just a matter of time and energy for us to either find these extra
dimensions or to rule out this theory completely," Landsberg said.
Landsberg has written an article explaining his work in the April 28 edition of
Ferminews.
Greg Landsberg, left, believes that if there are extra dimensions, they would be curled
At the American Physical Society annual conference in April, Landsberg reported
that he and other scientists have come the closest yet to proving or disproving
whether dimensions exist beyond the ones we know of: length, height and depth,
and a fourth one, time.