As technological advances enable researchers to smash together increasing numbers of infinitesimal particles within increasingly small spaces at higher energies, "we think some really new physics is going to show up," said Ashutosh Kotwal, an associate professor of physics at Duke. "Within 10 years, at Fermilab or at CERN, we will reach the threshold of a major new understanding of nature. Something really fundamentally new is about to happen."

Fermilab's Tevatron smashes together opposing beams of protons and antiprotons that travel around a buried "racetrack" four miles in circumference, propelled by radiofrequency waves and steered by superconducting magnets. The collisions generate energies of up to 1.96 trillion electron volts, the standard units of energy for measuring such events.

The Tevatron's design has "maxed out" on the amount of energy it can produce, Kotwal said. But scientists and engineers recently have been able to boost the rate of collisions -- known as "luminosity" -- to 10³² events per square centimeter area during each second. And that huge number (10 followed by 31 zeroes) could "grow by another factor of two in the next year," Kotwal said.

Doubling the collision rate could cut in half the time it takes to get results, Kotwal added.

The goal of particle smashing is to create such exotic particles as the top quark, which a large team of scientists -- a number of them from Duke -- first identified at the Tevatron in 1995. With the aid of the Tevatron's increasing collision rate, scientists are now trying to create enough extremely rare top quarks to determine their mass.

Kotwal is leading a similar quest for the precise mass of another particle, the W boson, which causes radioactivity.

"By making precise measurements of known particles, we can get information on the masses of particles that haven't even been discovered yet," Kotwal explained. These evaluations also will help scientists decide whether the current theory of elementary particles -- called the Standard Model -- needs to be revised, he said.

The search for new particles and new physics will shift from Fermilab to CERN's Large Hadron Collider when it opens within the next three or four years. There, researchers will smash together protons as well as the central nuclei of lead atoms speeding along a 16.7-mile underground racetrack. "The energy levels at the LHC will be seven times higher and the luminosity will eventually be 10 to 100 times higher than at Fermilab," said Alfred Goshaw, the head of Duke's high energy physics program.

"So it will almost certainly be a discovery machine," added Goshaw, whose group has been active at Fermilab and will continue its research at the LHC. "Everybody believes that in the next 10 years there will be a significant modification of the theory we now have for elementary particles."

Such new and unanticipated physics could eventually change "the fabric of our lives," Kotwal said, just as the discovery of quantum mechanics a century ago led to today's revolution in electronics and some aspects of medicine.

"If all your physics is telling you there is something phenomenal to be discovered, you go for it," he said.