By Laura Cummings
Dr. Alain Bellerive, a physics professor at Carleton University, may be expanding our view of the universe by studying some of the smallest things in it.
Bellerive, who holds the honour of the Canada Research Chair in Experimental Particle Physics, investigates the characteristics of neutrinos – uncharged elementary particles thought to be massless, or possessing a very low mass. They can have one of three forms, electron, muon or ta, and hardly ever interact with other particles.
With data collected by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), Bellerive studies the phenomena of neutrino oscillation, where neutrinos switch from one type to another during their transit from the core of the Sun to Earth.
Oscillation can conclude if neutrinos have mass, potentially illuminating new facets of physics and evolving present models of elementary particles.
In 2003, he joined the SNOLab research facility, an underground extension of the SNO experiment into a permanent, international resource.
Co-run by Carleton and funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), SNOLab has the deepest underground laboratory in the world and is used to further study neutrinos and their properties.
“What attracted me were this grandiose fact and the meaning to get to the smallest scale as possible to see not only the proton and neutron, which in high school we were taught were elementary particles, but to try to still divide the quarks and leptons and try to understand the foundation of matter of the smallest scale,” he said in a previous interview. “It’s like this cathedral of science and to probe the really small you have to get those cathedrals.”
Dr. Bellerive is now involved in the ATLAS experiment at CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The ATLAS experiment is an exciting project exploring physics at the TeV energy scale, where new kinds of phenomena are expected to appear. The LHC had a very successful start with the discovery of the Higgs boson. The 2014-2018 period should allow for the detailed study of the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, the exploration of the origin of mass and the search for particles that could make up the elusive dark matter.