Mexican-built particle detector slated to help global scientists illuminate the birth of the universe

A Mexican physicist was recently chosen to lead the development of a particle detector for one of the world’s largest scientific projects: an underground atom smasher in Europe that is helping scientists understand the universe shortly after the Big Bang.

The proposed detector would be built in Mexico and installed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), home of the Large Hadron Collider beneath a portion of the French-Swiss border.

The Mexican-built device, called the Muon Identifier Detector (MID), is planned for ALICE 3, a future version of one of the collider’s four main experiments.

If built and approved, it would give Mexican institutions responsibility for a central subsystem of ALICE 3.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider covering a circular circuit of 27 kilometers, or 17 miles, near Geneva, Switzerland. It speeds beams of protons or electrically charged atomic nuclei to within a whisker of the speed of light — about 1.08 billion km/h, or 671 million mph — before steering them into head-on collisions.

Collisions involving heavy atomic nuclei can briefly create matter thought to resemble conditions in the universe’s earliest moments.

The Mexican project is still not guaranteed to reach CERN.

While the MID is included in the reference design for ALICE 3, the Mexican team must obtain funding, finish the design and construction work and clear technical reviews before it can be installed. Operations are targeted for 2036.

The Mexican project is headed by Antonio Ortiz Velásquez, a senior researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) whose appointment was approved by the ALICE Collaboration Board, UNAM said Aug. 13.

UNAM said Ortiz, a physicist at UNAM’s Institute of Nuclear Sciences, is the first Mexican scientist chosen to direct development of a strategic ALICE 3 subsystem.

Mexico has already worked with ALICE for years, helping build and operate earlier detector equipment and analyze collision data, but the new project goes even further.

The Mexican-built device would track muons, small particles that can pass through much of the detector after a collision. Their paths can help researchers study a fleeting, superheated state of matter that scientists believe filled the universe immediately after the Big Bang.

“We are recreating tiny droplets from the early universe and studying them through the traces they leave in particle detectors,” Ortiz said.

The team hopes to begin construction in Mexico in 2028. It includes researchers from UNAM, the Center for Research and Advanced Studies, the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, the Autonomous University of Sinaloa and the National Technological Institute of Mexico, along with partners in the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Pakistan.