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 > Harvard University

Harvard University

A large disk, coppery in the center with silver tubes on the outside, hangs over a concrete floor

A small wheel, about to descend into the ATLAS cavern. Image courtesy of Harvard University

The Harvard ATLAS group has been working on the experiment since 1995, and currently consists of five faculty members, four postdocs, and eight grad students. Our group is continuing its work on muon detector commissioning, muon reconstruction software, and the integration of the muon detector into the ATLAS data acquisition system. In anticipation of the first LHC data, we have been studying various physics channels, and we are completing studies of ATLAS computation models.

The ATLAS muon spectrometer is composed of two main systems, the cylindrical barrel, whose axis is the beamline, and the endcaps, which close the ends of the barrel. The endcap spectrometer consists of three wheels at each end: the Small, Big, and Outer Wheels (see ATLAS picture ). The U.S. commitment has been to build the MDT chambers that provide precision measurements in the Small and Big Wheels. Harvard contributed to the production of eighty MDT (monitored drift tube) endcap muon chambers, as well as 16,000 readout electronics boards which cover the entire muon MDT system. We are now a part of the commissioning team preparing this system for LHC running in the summer of 2008.

The Harvard ATLAS group. Image courtesy of Harvard University

During the last two years, the Harvard group has begun to investigate several physics analyses. Because of the expertise in the muon detectors and software, we have focused mostly on final states that have high-energy muons. The physics topics investigated include study of the Z boson differential cross-section, exotic dilepton resonances, new heavy quarks in Little Higgs theories and Randall-Sundrum gluons decaying into top-antitop pairs.