High Energy Physics

Faculty, students revved up about Large Hadron Collider restart

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 22:34:06 +0000

Faculty, students revved up about Large Hadron Collider restart Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/06/2015 - 16:34

��«��Ƶ faculty and students are primed to get back in action following the Easter restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful atom smasher located near Geneva, Switzerland, after a two-year hiatus.

Following intensive upgrades and repairs, proton beams from the LHC once again began flying around a 17-mile underground loop below the Swiss-French border at nearly the speed of light. In 2012 the international research team -- which includes 10 CU-��«��Ƶ faculty, students and technicians -- used the particle collisions in the LHC to discover the elusive Higgs boson, a particle believed by physicists to endow the universe with mass.

The CU-��«��Ƶ high-energy physics team is involved with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of two massive particle detectors in the LHC and which weighs more than 12,500 tons. The CU team helped design and build the CMS forward pixel detectors -- the “eyes” of the device -- that help researchers measure the direction and momentum of subatomic particles following collisions, providing clues to their origin and structure.

William Ford, who recently retired from CU-��«��Ƶ as a physics professor but remains active in the LHC program, said four CU-��«��Ƶ graduate students working on the project -- Frank Jensen, Andrew Johnson, Mike Krohn and Troy Mulholland -- are eager to get their hands on new data. “They have published papers on earlier LHC data and tuned their techniques, and the real opportunity comes now as the LHS approaches its full design energy,” said Ford.

In addition to Ford, other CU-��«��Ƶ faculty and staff involved in the project include CU-��«��Ƶ physics Professor John Cumalat, physics Associate Professor Kevin Stenson and physics Professor Attendant Rank Steve Wagner. The CU-��«��Ƶ team also includes technical staff members Douglas Johnson and Eric Erdos.

During the LHC’s second run, particles will collide at a staggering 13 teraelectronvolts, which is 60 percent higher than any particle accelerator has achieved before. The particle collisions, hundreds of millions of them every second, are expected to lead scientists into unexplored realms of physics and could yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

“As we increase the energy we will certainly learn more about the properties of the Higgs particle, and maybe there will be other Higgs particles,” said Cumalat. “The next couple of years of accumulating and analyzing data should be very exciting.”

Fifteen years in the making, the $10 billion LHC involves an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers and technicians from 94 American universities supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Contact:
John Cumalat, 303-492-8604
john.p.cumalat@colorado.edu
William Ford, 303-492-6149
wtford@colorado.edu
Jim Scott, CU-��«��Ƶ media relations, 303-492-3114
jim.scott@colorado.edu

University of Colorado News Release

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International Collaboration Discovers Theoretical Boson at CERN

Anonymous — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 01:32:15 +0000

International Collaboration Discovers Theoretical Boson at CERN Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/06/2012 - 19:32

An international research team involving the ��«��Ƶ announced Wednesday morning, July 4th that it has found the first direct evidence for a new particle that likely is the long sought-after Higgs boson, believed to endow the universe with mass.

The CU-��«��Ƶ high-energy physics team, which includes 15 faculty and students, is involved with the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of two massive particle detectors in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The CU team helped design and build the CMS forward pixel detectors -- the “eyes” of the device -- that help researchers measure the direction and momentum of subatomic particles following collisions, providing clues to their origin and structure.

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CU Physics Faculty Part of International Team to Discover New Type of Neutrino Oscillation

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 04:18:00 +0000

CU Physics Faculty Part of International Team to Discover New Type of Neutrino Oscillation Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/15/2011 - 22:18

As part of the international T2K collaboration team led by Japan, researchers from the T2K group at CU ��«��Ƶ have discovered indications of a new type of neutrino oscillation in an experiment in Japan. The announcement was delivered by the international T2K collaboration on Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

The T2K group at CU ��«��Ƶ consists of Professors Alysia Marino and Eric Zimmerman, as well as several post docs, including Robert Johnson, Stephen Coleman and grad students, including Tianlu Yuan and Andrew Missert. The T2K group often utilizes post docs, grad students and undergrad students to help conduct research in the field of high energy physics.

Using a beam of muon neutrinos that travel 295 km across Japan, researchers at the T2K collaboration have observed that muon neutrinos appear to turn into electron neutrinos. Researchers expected to see 1.5 electron neutrino-like events in a giant Super-Kamiokande Detector, but observed 6 events.

The T2K, or Tokai to Kamioka experiment, is the product of collaboration between researchers in Japan and around the world. The experiment included shooting a beam of neutrinos underground from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC, on the country's east coast to a detector near Japan's west coast, a distance of about 185 miles.

A pdf version of the paper outlining this discovery is available on the T2K English Web site.

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