About the US/LHC Project

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland is opening new vistas on the deepest secrets of the universe, stretching the imagination with newly discovered forms of matter, forces of nature, and dimensions of space. This site provides general information about the Large Hadron Collider and detailed information about American participation in the LHC accelerator and experiments. U.S. LHC participation is supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers). This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. (Courtesy: CERN)

Home > The US and the LHC > Collaborating Institutions > Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory

A man sits on the floor in front of a detector

Physicist Denis Damazio controls the front end crate of the Barrel Liquid Argon Calorimeter in ATLAS (green lights on) with his laptop, June 2006 Image courtesy of BNL

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is both an active participant in the ATLAS Collaboration and the U.S. host laboratory for the experiment. Scientists from BNL have also made vital contributions to the construction of the LHC accelerator, and is collaborating on the commissioning and future upgrades for the accelerator.

The lab was involved in the construction of various parts of the ATLAS experiment and is now involved with testing, maintaining, operating and developing software for these devices: the Liquid Argon (LAr) Barrel Cryostat and all the signal feedthroughs, the LAr cryogenics and electronics systems, and Cathode Strip Chambers for the end-cap muon spectrometer.

Brookhaven is active in various detector performance groups, which characterize the performance of the ATLAS detector in identifying different types of particles such as electrons, photons, jets, and missing energy. Members of the BNL group work to implement the trigger, which selects collisions to be saved for further analysis. Brookhaven scientists also develop software to use the ATLAS detector to search for evidence of supersymmetry, the Higgs boson, and precision measurements of Standard Model signatures.

BNL is the site of the U.S. Tier 1 computing center for ATLAS – the largest ATLAS Tier 1 center worldwide – which will store and process data from the ATLAS experiment, make the data available to researchers from the U.S. and worldwide, and support physics analysis. BNL has software professionals devoted mostly to distributed data management – crucial for the U.S. effort to analyze data from the ATLAS experiment. As host laboratory, BNL has one of the three U.S. ATLAS Analysis Support Centers and organizes period analysis “Jamborees.” BNL also provides leadership and project management resources for the U.S. ATLAS Construction Project and the U.S. ATLAS Operations Program. In addition, Brookhaven leads technical coordination efforts, including the Project Office for the upgrade of the ATLAS detector. Specific work is being done at BNL on the new silicon tracker, the new liquid argon electronics, and the new muon chambers.

Brookhaven also is contributing to the commissioning and future upgrade of the LHC itself in two areas: accelerator physics and superconducting magnets. This work is carried out as part of the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) in collaboration with Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Much of LARP’s work uses Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) as a “test bed” for the beam-based development of devices destined for the LHC. The LHC tune and chromaticity feedback hardware and algorithms, for example, were developed through collaboration between LARP and CERN in the RHIC collider. LARP will continue to perform R&D aimed at supporting LHC upgrades that strive to increase the LHC luminosity even further. For example, if “electron lenses” can be validated in action in RHIC, they may be used to combat the fundamental nonlinear disruptions caused by the beam-beam effect in both colliders. BNL is also taking a leading role in an international collaboration to develop “crab cavities,” which, if successful, will allow proton bunches to collide (slightly) sideways as they pass through the collision points in the LHC, increasing luminosity while also allowing larger crossing angles to further minimize the damage done by the beam-beam effect.

CERN plans to upgrade the LHC in two phases. During Phase 1, scheduled for 2013, the dipoles located nearest ATLAS and CMS will be replaced with larger-aperture magnets. A proposal to use the design of the RHIC DX dipole, slightly modified, is now being written. For Phase 2, scheduled for 2017, BNL is working with Fermilab and Berkeley to develop superconducting quadrupoles made with a higher-performing superconductor, Nb3Sn, to replace the existing NbTi superconducting quadrupoles that focus the beam just prior to collisions.