From scientific hypothesis to real-world machinery

If you need a compact muon solenoid, Farshid Feyzi is the man to see. He and his colleagues at UW–Madison’s Physical Sciences Laboratory are some of the few people in the world who know what the device is — and how to build one.

And there will be only one — when it’s finished, that is. The solenoid, a subatomic-particle detector that scientists will use to seek evidence of a certain kind of particle known as a Higgs boson, will be assembled in Geneva, Switzerland, in a couple of years. Its components are under construction at many labs and factories around the world.

PSL is one of those labs, and Feyzi’s concern lies in the engineering problem of building a working compact muon solenoid — which, as it turns out, isn’t all that compact. The instrument’s two endcaps — which are PSL’s responsibility — each weigh about 3,000 tons.

“This is a big project,” says Feyzi, referring not only to the solenoid’s size and importance, but also to the administrative complexity of international construction. Feyzi must travel three or four times a year to Geneva and labs in China and Japan to confer on the solenoid’s progress. “At first I did quite a bit of engineering on this project myself,” he says, “but now most of my work requires diplomacy and tact.”

In its cavernous, aluminum building north of Stoughton, PSL designs and builds unusual — often unique — scientific instruments for researchers at the UW and elsewhere. Since 1996, Feyzi has been the lab’s associate director, supervising the 30 members of the PSL’s technical staff — the engineers who design such instruments, the machinists who build them and the specialists who calibrate them.

The PSL exists mainly to help researchers overcome one problem: the gulf that separates scientific hypothesis from real-world conditions. Feyzi’s team has constructed speech therapy monitors for the Waisman Center, vacuum chambers for the physics department and rainfall runoff samplers for the state department of Natural Resources.

They are aiding the univesity with a project called AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, which requires several hundred neutrino detectors — basketball-size devices that allow physicists to observe some of the most elusive of subatomic particles. PSL is not only building the detectors, but also a hydraulic drill that will allow scientists to place those detectors two miles deep in the Antarctic ice.

“In the years PSL has been here,” Feyzi says, “we’ve done more than 6,000 projects, and each one is different. But overcoming unique problems — that’s what we’re good at.”