Transforming energy, making matter

November 14, 2024

Antimatter; Mozart; UVic: The theme throughout this composition is experimental particle physicist Heather Russell.

The assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy studies the most basic particles - from quarks in the Standard Model of particle physics to quarter notes in Mozart’s Requiem.

Russell is one of 40 altos in the Victoria Choral Society, and importantly, one of 5,500 members of the ATLAS experiment at CERN who are trying to solve some of the universe’s many mysteries.

“We propel particles – mostly protons – at superhigh speeds in the Large Hadron Collider,” Russell says. “When they collide, which they do a billion times per second, the kinetic energy of the movement of those protons is converted to mass, that is, new particles. The particle accelerators and detectors allow us to study these fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them."

The Standard Model of particle physics explains much of what we know about the world — but not everything.

“There’s an imbalance between matter and antimatter,” Russell says. “If you start from nothing, like at the start of the big bang, and create matter, you have to also create antimatter.”

But while there is a planet Earth, anti-Earth doesn’t exist. And then there’s also dark matter, which we see evidence of in observations of spinning galaxies, but physicists don’t yet know how it fits into the Standard Model.

So, Russell is also leading a new project called MATHUSLA, the MAssive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra-Stable neutraL pArticles. Like the Large Hadron Collider, this new type of detector will also be located at CERN in Switzerland to help scientists search for long-lived particles whose existence might explain such major outstanding questions.

Russell hopes that her studies will help confirm the predictive power of the Standard Model, or, “if we're lucky,” she says, “provide a tantalising insight into some of the most notable mysteries of the universe. If we truly want to understand the composition of the universe, we need to understand how it works at the smallest level. Investigating these fundamental questions allows science to progress. The knowledge comes first, then we learn how to apply it.”

And that’s the siren song that drew Russell to this field.

“I like math,” she says, “but pure math didn’t seem like it had enough purpose.”

She completed a BSc in physics at UVic (while also singing in the Prima Youth Choir, where physicists, she notes, were “vastly over-represented”). And she wanted more. After a master’s degree in theoretical physics, she began a PhD in Physics Education. When she realized she wasn’t ready to leave fundamental physics behind, she completed her PhD in particle physics and worked as a senior research fellow at CERN before joining UVic in 2021.

And Russell continues to expand her contributions to physics education. In addition to teaching university courses, she also conducts a Master Class for high-school students every spring and reaches K-12 students through UVic’s Science Rendezvous program.

Through math, matter and music, Heather Russell makes the world a bigger place by introducing teens to bosons, hitting the high notes — and translating energy into mass at the speed of light.

Rachel Goldsworthy