The Heart of Matter

Fall 2025
By Silvia Cernea Clark
Video by Gustavo Raskosky

To study the smallest constituents of matter, you need an instrument as powerful as the most advanced telescope: At the subatomic scale, matter plays by different rules, and the phenomena observed are as difficult to obtain and interpret as glimpses of deep space. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, runs the world’s most powerful instrument for studying subatomic matter — the Large Hadron Collider.

The collider is installed across a region including both French and Swiss territory. On the map, it traces a circle undiscerning of the border between the two countries. In a sense, the collider’s 17-mile-long circular track enacts a symbolic act of erasure that CERN replicates in respect to borders more generally: CERN is a singular place — a multi-decade, multigenerational collaboration running an experiment comprising about 12,000 scientists from more than 70 countries.

The collider’s ring of superconducting magnets propels a beam of particles at near light speed, causing them to smash into each other and shatter into cosmic debris. Physicists study these events for answers to fundamental questions: What is the universe made of, and what are the rules and principles that govern its existence? What is matter, and how did it come to be? 

There are four sites along the circular track of the LHC where collisions are made to occur. Built at and around these sites are detectors — giant machines designed to act as traps or sieves that capture and sift through the subatomic debris emanating from the collisions. The Compact Muon Solenoid is one of two primary detectors at CERN — and one of Rice’s global outposts. 

Though it is only about one-fifth the size of the International Space Station, the CMS detector is 33 times heavier: a 14,000-ton layered apparatus packed tightly inside and around a cylindrical magnet 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. This magnet bends the trajectories of charged particles emanating from the collisions, giving scientists clues about their identity and behavior.
 

Making history: Rice at CERN

Back in Houston, on the ground floor of Herman Brown Hall on Rice’s campus, a tiny owl adorns a green circuit board. On a desk beside it glistens a tiny chip spliced into even tinier squares — each bonded with a delicate gold filament finer than human hair, like some strange insect robot. These, along with other instruments — some still in the design stage, some already sealed up and packed neatly in a box ready for transport — will soon make their way to the experimental cavern, and, eventually, become incorporated into the CMS. 

Rice has a long history of participation at CMS. Rice faculty, students and staff have worked on the design, assembly, testing, integration, and operation of critical hardware and software components of the CMS experiment from its earliest stages, helping overcome challenges and sharing in its successes. Today, there are 35 Rice-affiliated researchers working on the experiment, 10 of whom are stationed at CERN.

In 2012, CMS, together with its sister experiment, ATLAS, confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson — a historic breakthrough that resolved one of the last standing gaps in the Standard Model, a theory that predicts the existence of different kinds of subatomic particles and the fundamental forces that govern their behavior and interactions. 

This achievement would not have been possible without the work carried out at Rice and in hundreds of laboratories around the world: A global effort with a historic mission spanning decades and generations, CERN is a “model of knowledge stewardship and international scientific collaboration,” says Frank Geurts, a Rice particle physicist who is one of five Rice faculty who are co-investigators at the LHC.

 

Science for peace and the public good

Established in the mid-1950s in the wake of World War II, CERN was envisioned as a peace-driven alternative to national nuclear programs. 

“When CERN was formed in the 1950s, having French and German scientists work together was not something you could take for granted,” says Paul Padley, a Rice particle physicist known for his contributions to the experimental efforts at CERN. “CERN’s mission is as much about physics as it is about international collaboration.”

The war left European countries reeling, triggering a brain drain on the continent. Europe’s best-and-brightest were drawn to the U.S., where the war effort had incentivized government support for scientific research in recognition of the critical role of a scientific and technological edge for national security and economic growth. 

To counter this exodus of talent and rebuild European science, 12 European countries signed the CERN Convention in 1953, committing a portion of their gross domestic product to support the development and operation of high-energy physics research infrastructure and programs. The U.S. provided critical, though indirect, support to the initiative, in line with its commitments under the Marshall Plan and spurred by the advocacy of U.S. scientists like Isidor Rabi. Today, CERN numbers 25 member states, with the U.S. and Japan holding observer status.

You are contributing to something you might not live to see finished, like the buildings that used to take one or two hundred years to complete. We measure things no one has measured before, and sometimes, it’s exactly what theory predicted. But sometimes it’s not — and that’s what we hope for, the surprises. — Karl Ecklund, physicist
 

CERN explicitly excludes “work for military requirements” from its statement of purpose and designates “the results of its experimental and theoretical work” as beholden to no proprietary claims other than those of the public good.

Though its scope is “nuclear research of a pure scientific and fundamental character,” innovations stemming from CERN have a profound societal impact: The world’s first website and server went live at CERN; medical technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Therapy, positron emission tomography and hadron therapy also derive from the work of CERN scientists and engineers; CERN technologies inform applications in environmental monitoring and aerospace, art restoration and more.
 

What’s next — Upgrades for decades of future experiments

Currently, Rice members of the CMS collaboration are focused on the next stage of the detector. In 2026, the LHC is scheduled to go on a three-year hiatus, time in which both the collider and the detectors and experiments it feeds, are scheduled to undergo a significant upgrade. Wei Li, a Rice physicist who is a co-investigator on the CMS experiment, leads a team working on a new detector component called the endcap timing layer. 

“The current detector tells us where something hits, but we also want to know when,” Li says. “That will give us a much fuller picture.”

Darin Acosta, a Rice physicist whose team works on the electronics and online system that analyze and filter collision data in real time, says the upgrades will generate 10 times more data.

“We have to be highly selective,” Acosta says. “We have special electronic chips to do the first kind of pattern recognition and processing. We even use machine learning to help us reduce the amount of data selected for analysis by a factor of 100,000 or so. After this initial culling, the data is sent to computing centers that filter out even more of it.”

Rice physicist Karl Ecklund likens the CMS to a kind of modern cathedral. He also points out that the open-ended nature of fundamental research is closer to aesthetic pursuits, where the outcomes of artists’ travails are never prescriptive or entirely predictable.

“You are contributing to something you might not live to see finished, like the buildings that used to take one or two hundred years to complete,” Ecklund says. “We measure things no one has measured before, and sometimes, it’s exactly what theory predicted. But sometimes it’s not — and that’s what we hope for, the surprises.”
 

Owls at CERN

We asked a group of Rice researchers to tell us about their current research and recent experience at CERN.
Here’s what they had to say:

Muti Wulansatiti

At the heart of the detector

Born in Hawaii but raised in Indonesia, Muti Wulansatiti navigated the liminal identity of being technically a U.S. citizen but feeling “100% like an international student” during her time as a Ph.D. student at Florida State University. She always enjoyed math and physics, but the moment she realized her calling for the field of high energy physics coincided with a significant historical event: As a teenager, she followed various science channels on YouTube, and in 2012, when the Higgs boson was announced, she got to learn about CERN.

“I found things that they do at CERN really fascinating,” Wulansatiti says. “To be honest, it was less about the physics and more about the technology, the really big machines and the collaboration.” 

Even after three and a half years at CERN, seeing the CMS detector in person still inspires awe. “It’s so complex, no one person can explain what every single component does,” she says. “It’s a privilege to be involved in something of this scale.”

Now a Rice postdoctoral researcher working with Ecklund, she helps manage operations for the pixel detector — the innermost layer of the CMS, closest to the particle collisions. This involves attending morning meetings to review calibration and data-taking schedules for the day, and coordinating with colleagues at CERN and around the world. The rest of Wulansatiti’s time is devoted to physics analysis: She examines data collected by the CMS experiment in search of a hypothetical particle called a composite pseudoscalar — a “lighter cousin” of the Higgs.  

During the upcoming shutdown of the collider, Wulansatiti will help disassemble the old detector and commission the new one. By the time operations resume, “it will be the beginning of a new era in high-energy physics,” she says. Her long-term goal is to return to Indonesia as faculty and “help build the high-energy physics community there.”
 

Collin Arbour

A part of something monumental

Collin Arbour started out interested in biology but kept zooming in — through genetics, biochemistry and chemistry — all the way down to a metaphorical bedrock: particle physics. 

“I just kind of cascaded my way down,” he says. “And now I’ve kind of hit the bottom, I guess — the most fundamental parts.”

Arbour chose Rice for his doctoral studies in part because he knew the university “had a good presence on the CMS experiment, and that it was common for them to send students over.” As one of Padley’s Ph.D. students, Arbour is spending a couple of years in Geneva, at CERN, where he splits his time between physics analysis and hardware work with the cathode strip chambers — gaseous detectors that measure the tracks of passing muons. The length of his stay is typical, with most CERN graduate or postdoctoral research experiences lasting anywhere from a few months to a few years. 

“Everyone’s kind of transient,” Arbour says. “But people are eager to meet and socialize.” 

His daily rhythm shifts depending on the work at hand: simulation, analysis and coding at one site; benchtop lab tests at another; or full-on hardware interventions deep underground at the CMS cavern, where the solenoidal magnet is so strong that your laptop might stop working unless you duck behind a pillar. 

Being on shift means taking responsibility for the cathode strip chambers around the clock — sometimes responding to 3 a.m. phone calls. 

“It’s kind of a stressful week when you do it,” Arbour says. “I don’t sleep so great. You don’t want to miss a call.” 

Arbour is helping prepare the detectors for the next phase of the experiment, the high-luminosity upgrade, which will drastically increase the number of collisions. He is also running sustainability tests, searching for greener gas mixtures that could replace the current ones without compromising performance.

“It’s super exciting to be contributing, even if it’s just a small part, to such a monumental effort,” he says. “It’s kind of a dream come true … diving into something so fundamental. It’s a realization of the human spirit.”
 

Taylor Carnahan

‘The fingerprints of what got us here’

As a scientist with a fine arts background and a side gig as an aerial dance choreographer and instructor, Taylor Carnahan’s path to particle physics stands out as unconventional. However, she sees an underlying continuity between artistic and spiritual dimensions and the practice of science — all are imbued with creativity. “The beauty and the order in the math of quantum physics is really intriguing to me,” says Carnahan, who describes herself as “an artist by trade.”

Carnahan, a graduate student in Padley’s group finishing up her dissertation work this summer, studies the Higgs boson. The high-energy collisions in the LHC, or “atom smasher” as she calls it, give us a baseline idea of what the moments right after the big bang might have looked like, and thus an opportunity to look for traces of the Higgs and learn about its properties. 

“We try to figure out why things are the way they are. We kind of poke and prod the beginning a little bit [looking for] the fingerprints of what got us here today. The electrons and the protons and neutrons, and you and I have a certain amount of mass, and we have no idea why. We believe it is the Higgs that causes that.” 

Carnahan spent several months at CERN in summer 2022. She recalls arriving on the bus, croissant and espresso in hand, entering the sunlit plaza with the flags of member countries waving above, badging in — and then getting lost. “It happens to everyone,” she says. Eventually, she learned her way around and made friends from countries all over the world. Going for coffee is a periodic, collective ritual, she says, and “there are espresso machines sitting in the corner of the most esoteric building.”

Carnahan’s work leans more theoretical and involves modeling and checking that the physics showing up in the detector make sense. Even though the data people work with may be the same, she says, nonetheless, it is a generous canvas that allows for creativity in choosing how to handle and interpret it. 

“People come with different assumptions, different interpretations — it is important to have a lot of minds come to bear when you are working on such foundational questions for humankind — it’s beautiful,” she says.
 

Patrick Kelling

Working at CERN from Houston

Patrick Kelling grew up in Clear Lake, “right down the road from NASA.” But despite what he calls a “similar vibe” between the two places, working at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory was not something he set out to do. 

“I had left school and was just working in restaurants for a while,” he recalls. 

It was not until he re-enrolled at San Jacinto Community College in Houston that he met a professor — a former Rice postdoc — who mentioned something that sounded almost mythical: a student opportunity at CERN. 

“I was like, ‘That sounds amazing. CERN?’” Kelling says. “I feel like people hear about CERN, but it seems … I don’t know — far off.” He followed up a year later, by then an undergrad at the University of Houston. To his surprise, they still needed help. So, in fall 2019, Kelling landed in Geneva and was soon commuting out to the CMS experiment site in the French countryside. 

“I had no clue what I was getting myself into,” he admits. “But it’s kind of funny — the stuff I learned there, I still use today.”

Kelling now works full time as an engineer on Acosta’s team. He is excited to see the new upgrades to the system get implemented starting in 2026.

“CERN is a really special place,” Kelling says. “You have people from all over the world, from countries that don’t get along, just working together on science.” He remembers an office shared by two interns: one from India, one from Pakistan. “It’s probably unique in the world, that kind of collaboration,” Kelling says.