Vol. 15 No. 1, 2009 - Department of Physics - University of ...

8 The Wisconsin Physicist
UW High Energy Physics
The Large Hadron Collider
University of Wisconsin
High Energy Physics
group members got their
first experience with protons in
September at the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva
Switzerland. Eventually, the LHC will
operate at seven times the energy
and 100 times the luminosity of
the present world’s highest energy
collider, the Fermilab Tevatron, and
will permit physicists to search for
the mechanism of particle mass
generation, for supersymmetry (SUSY)
which introduces a partner for each
known particle, stabilizes the higgs
mass and provides a candidate for
the dark matter making up most of
the universe, for extra dimensions
and for other exciting new physics
possibilities.
Profs. Duncan Carlsmith, Sridhara
Dasu, Matt Herndon, Wesley Smith,
and Distinguished Scientist Dr.
Richard Loveless operated major
parts of CMS they had worked on
during these initial beam tests:
the trigger system including the
calorimeter level-1 trigger and higher
level triggers, the endcap muon
system including its infrastructure
and alignment, tracking system
infrastructure, software for simulation
and event processing and a leading
Tier-2 US CMS computing facility.
Profs. Bruce Mellado, Yibin Pan,
Sau Lan Wu, and Senior Scientist
Dr. Haimo Zobernig were involved
in readying the ATLAS experiment
for first beam. They have leading
roles in the silicon and pixel readout
driver, high level trigger, detector
performance studies, software, and
computing.
Profs. Vernon Barger, Dan Chung,
Lisa Everett, Francis Halzen, Tao Han,
Frank Petriello, Michael Ramsey-
Musolf and Gary Shiu continue to
hone their calculations of new physics
models and backgrounds to interpret
the new data from the LHC and to
connect the results of the LHC to
other exciting physics phenomena
such as astronomical observations of
cold dark matter and studies of the
cosmological origins of the Universe.
On September 10 the first beam in
the LHC was successfully steered
around the full 27 kilometers of the
ring. Subsequently the beam was
captured by the RF and showed very
promising performance in terms of
alignment and optics. On September
19, during powering tests of a main
dipole circuit, an electrical fault
resulting in mechanical damage to
some of the magnets. The repair
of these magnets will be done over
the CERN winter shutdown and it is
now planned to have the LHC start
collisions at an initial center of mass
energy of 10 TeV in 2009.
The Wisconsin teams on ATLAS and
CMS have been working on these
projects since 1993 and with first
collisions are now scheduled for 2009,
are eagerly awaiting the opening of
this new energy frontier.
ATLAS
CMS