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)

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New York University

While individual faculty members in the New York University (NYU) Experimental Particle Physics Group have participated in the ATLAS experiment since 1996, our group became an official member of the ATLAS collaboration in 2006. The group currently consists of three experimental physics faculty members (Profs. Kyle Cranmer, Allen Mincer, and Peter Nemethy), a theorist who is part time with our group, three research scientists, a technician, and several graduate students.

The theoretical framework that incorporates the known particles and describes their interactions has been so successful that it is now called the "Standard Model". Only one major prediction remains to be confirmed, the existence of a new massive particle called the "Higgs Particle". Our group is active in searches for the Higgs in the mass range preferred by other indirect measurements. Though the Standard Model has been very successful, for several reasons it appears to be incomplete, and several "Beyond the Standard Model" (BSM) theories have been suggested, including Supersymmetry and theories with additional space-time dimensions. The NYU group is developing methods to identify and study the properties of the new massive particles that may be produced by energetic proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

At the Large Hadron Collider, counter-rotating bunches of protons moving at velocities close to speed of light collide 40 million times a second. As the average ATLAS detector information for each such bunch crossing is about 2 mega-bytes, one second of running produces about 80 tera-bytes of data, much too much to store or analyze. ATLAS uses a hierarchical trigger system to quickly decide which events are interesting enough to keep and stores about 100 of these per second. The NYU group is focusing on a software part of the trigger for Missing Transverse Energy (MET), which is vital for the discovery of several scenarios of BSM physics. MET measures an imbalance of momentum in the plane perpendicular to the direction of the colliding protons, and is sensitive to production of energetic particles that don't interact in the detector. Because the bulk of proton-proton interactions are not expected to have large values of MET, this "signature" is an effective way to select events where Supersymmetric particles are produced.

Members of the NYU group also have worked or are working on various other aspects of ATLAS. Much of this effort centers on taking the large amount of information available for each event and organizing it in a form that makes it more straightforward to analyze.