Knight Professor Studies Time,
Space Secrets
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Brau, who directs the UO Center for High Energy Physics,
also leads national and international research involving
scores of projects by hundreds of colleagues around the
globe.
“Jim is clearly one of the biggest leaders on super
small particles,” said Joe Stone, former dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences. Stone noted that Brau is the
only U.S. scientist among the three leaders of a worldwide
community of physicists preparing experiments for what will
be one of history’s biggest science projects, a twenty-mile-long
particle accelerator called the International Linear Collider.
The collider’s twin particle accelerators will hurl
some ten billion electrons and their antiparticles, positrons,
toward each other at nearly the speed of light, fifteen
thousand times per second.
The resulting smash-ups, Brau says, will generate other
fundamental particles so far unseen by humankind. Such discoveries
would yield “the missing puzzle pieces” needed
to unlock the mysteries of space and time. Brau’s
life work focuses on the invention of tools capable of detecting
such particles, which appear for less than a millionth of
a millionth of a second.
