For more than a decade, scientists around the world have been planning furiously for one of the most highly anticipated physics experiments ever, one so significant that it promises to change our understanding of the universe.

When theoretical physicist Laura Reina joined Florida State in 1998, she wanted in. She walked away from a solid record of research in another specialty to become part of physics history—and future. It was a high-risk move but irresistible.

“It was new to me,” she said. “However, I had this perspective: With the building of this new machine, physics was going to tell us what the future was going to be.”

The new machine is the Large Hadron Collider, under construction near Geneva, Switzerland. When completed—by 2007 at the earliest—the LHC will be the world’s largest physics lab: a nearly 17-mile underground, circular tunnel that straddles the France-Switzerland border. In essence, it is designed to smash protons together and recreate cosmic conditions fractions of a second after the big bang.

Starting with just a pencil and paper, Reina has been calculating and recalculating predictions of what will happen when the LHC fires its first streams of particles at each other.

The potential results? An answer that has thwarted scientists for years: Does the long-elusive Higgs particle really exist? If it does, as physicists have theorized since 1964, it’s one of the most fundamental particles in the universe—the one some scientists think gives all others mass. Its detection has been the most elusive part of a physics model that has otherwise withstood a bombardment of tests. Scientists are “reasonably” sure the evasive particle exists, said Reina, but have yet to prove it.

“Now we are really for the first time crossing the threshold of energy and looking to something new, and we don’t really know what we’re going to see,” Reina said. —C.S.

For her critical contributions to high-energy physics, Laura Reina received a 2006 Developing Scholar Award from FSU and a highly coveted fellowship from the American Physical Society. Reina received her doctorate degree in elementary particle physics from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy.