28-Jun-08 5:00 PM EST

Bjorken-Mtingwa Theory to be Tested at the Large Hadron Collider

By Nicole Majoras, Communication of Science and Technology Program, Vanderbilt University

A theory of intrabeam scattering developed by Sekazi Mtingwa, former president of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), and his colleague James Bjorken will soon be tested at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC is more than 16 miles in circumference, and will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. After nearly a decade of construction, the first LHC beams will be produced next month.

In particle accelerator beams, intrabeam scattering causes the physical size of the beam as well as the distribution of particle momentum to increase. Mtingwa and Bjorken developed their theory, which quantifies the spatial and momentum extent of particle beams, in 1983 while they were both at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab is the home of the Tevatron, for now still the highest energy particle collider in the world.

“There was a major crisis in the US high-energy physics program because the Tevatron’s performance was nowhere close to design specifications,” recalls Mtingwa. “At first no one knew what the cause was, but after a lot of analysis it turned out that intrabeam scattering was the main culprit, and the Bjorken-Mtingwa theory solved the mystery.”

“We wanted to make sure that as we collected antiprotons in the accumulator storage ring before sending them out to the main Tevatron collider, the beams did not grow too much in size. We used field theory to derive our results. We happened to be in the right place at the right time to use our high-energy theory techniques to solve an applied beam dynamics problem. So far, the theory has stood the test of time since 1983,” says Mtingwa.

In fact, today the Bjorken-Mtingwa Theory is one of the most widely used beam design equations in accelerator physics. The performance of practically all modern particle accelerators from hadron colliders, to synchrotron light sources, to electron and positron damping rings are constrained by intrabeam scattering. Before 1983, accelerators were not sufficiently intense for intrabeam scattering to be important. Now, the strong-focusing theory of Mtingwa and Bjorken is a part of almost every accelerator design if the intrabeam scattering is to be kept under control.

Though the LHC will have much greater energy and intensity than the Tevatron, Mtingwa fully expects the theory to hold up at the LHC and there to be no problems.

He points out, however, that the beauty of science is that you never know what you will discover next.

Dr. Mtingwa is currently a Senior Lecturer at MIT. He earned undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics at MIT, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his masters and Ph.D in theoretical high-energy physics from Princeton University. After performing post doctoral work at the University of Rochester and the University of Maryland, Mtingwa moved to Fermilab. From there he moved to North Carolina A&T State University, where he was chair of the physics department and laid the foundation for the current graduate program in physics. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and at Morgan State University. Mtingwa is involved in a number of national and international initiatives. He is a former Board Member and one of the founders of the African Laser Centre, a network of thirty laboratories throughout Africa that are engaged in laser-related research and training. From 1998-2008 he served on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee. Mtingwa serves on the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs, for which he co-chaired a 2007 study on electricity storage technologies and just concluded chairing another study on U.S. workforce readiness to meet future nuclear challenges.

In 2007, Mtingwa received the Science Education Award and was the keynote speaker at the National Council of Ghanaian Associations’ March 10 Benefit Gala in New York City that celebrated the 50^th Anniversary of Ghana’s Independence, having been the first African country south of the Sahara to gain independence from colonialism. The award was for outstanding contributions to science education among African peoples.

He was President of NSBP from 1992-94.

The Bjorken-Mtingwa Theory was first reported in Particle Accelerators, Volume 13, Page 115. A new approximation was recently reported in African Physical Review, Volume 2, Issue 1.

(full bio, Physics Central)