The testing of a particle collider in Switzerland on Wednesday drew special interest from Jose Alonso, director of the underground laboratory being planned in the former Homestake Gold Mine in Lead.

His previous work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California involved the ATLAS Detector that is part of the Large Hadron Collider, which test-fired protons around a 17-mile underground tunnel. Eventually protons will be fired in opposite directions to collide, possibly revealing clues about their structure from the particles that are produced.

Alonso was part of a team at the Berkeley Laboratory that worked on one component of the large detector, a pixel detector located millimeters from the collision point.

"I worked on what are called the services for the pixel detector for about four years. There were something like 70 million individual pieces of little silicon that are active, that are detecting the passage of particles through them," Alonso said. "So the care and feeding of these, getting power into them, getting cooling, getting signals out and the calibrations and everything else is a massive, massive job and so I was very heavily involved in that."

Alonso said he made eight or nine trips abroad to help with installation and calibration of equipment and to help train others as the project neared completion.

The idea for the Large Hadron Collider came 24 years ago from scientists of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Its 20 member nations and observer countries such as the United States and Japan contributed $10 billion to the project.

As the Hadron work finished at Berkeley, Alonso said he was approached about becoming director of the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake, a job he began last October.

The National Science Foundation has chosen the closed Homestake mine for a federally funded physics lab with facilities down to 8,000 feet below ground where researchers can conduct experiments without interference from cosmic rays.

Alonso said there's a correlation between research to be done in Switzerland and in Lead.

"We're all trying to find answers to the same basic questions of nature. Sometimes the approaches are a little bit different. The questions such as what is mass or what holds universe together, understanding forces, understanding all these things. Depending on the tools that you have you branch off in different directions. We're approaching the same questions by slightly different ways."