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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Ohio State University

The Ohio State University participates in three major experiments at CERN. The ATLAS and CMS experiments are designed to study high energy physics with proton on proton collisions while the ALICE experiment is primarily designed to study nuclear physics with relativistic heavy ion collisions. The ATLAS group at OSU is led by Professors Gan, Kagan, and Kass, the CMS group by Professors Durkin, Hughes, Ling, and Winer and the ALICE group by Professors Humanic and Lisa. All together, there are about ten post-doctoral research associates, ten graduate students, and several undergraduate students participating in this exciting research. The ATLAS and CMS groups are supported in part by the US Department of Energy while the ALICE group is supported in part by the NSF.

The ATLAS group at OSU led the R&D and fabrication of the optical electronics for the pixel detector. The detector contains 80 million silicon pixels, much like the pixel detector in a digital camera, to precisely pinpoint the decay location of heavy particles produced in the collisions. The detector is situated closest to the collision region and hence is subjected to intense radiation. The group led the design of the radiation-hard chips (integrated circuits) for the optical readout system similar to those used in optical telecommunications. In addition, the group led the assembly of the chips and optical components on printed circuit boards they designed using an exotic ceramic material. The group also led the construction of the beam condition monitors with diamond as the detecting media due to its high speed and radiation resistance.

The CMS group has played a leading role in the design, construction and management of front-end and data acquisition electronics system for the cathode strip chambers (CSC) in the CMS Muon Detector. This device is designed to detect muons, the heavier cousin of electrons, which will be critical in the identification of new heavy particles expected in high energy collisions.

In addition to initiating the architecture of the CSC electronics system, the CMS group developed the key front-end electronics board, designed and tested several different types of circuit boards in the data acquisition (DAQ) system and implemented DAQ firmware. The scope of the group's detector construction responsibility includes 220,000 channels of cathode front-end electronics and all of the data acquisition electronics for CSC readout. In addition, the group has also written software for reconstruction of CSC hits and muon track segments.

The ALICE group has responsibility for two hardware projects: testing silicon drift detectors for the Inner Tracking System (ITS), and designing, fabricating and installing the ITS laser alignment system. The group’s software efforts have been focused toward ITS tracking software and developing and implementing a software chain for physics analysis of two particle femtoscopy. Since 2002, the group has been collaborating with the Ohio Supercomputer Center to contribute large-scale resources to the ALICE computing effort, participating in simulated Data Challenge exercises, in order to quickly analyze first data in 2008.

The high energy collisions at the LHC have the great potential of producing new particles or interactions that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. The ATLAS group at OSU is searching for evidence of mini black holes that might be produced. In addition, the group is also searching for new phenomena by investigating the production and decay of the Z bosons, the neutral form of the weak interaction responsible for the radiative disintegration of the nucleus. The physics interests of the CMS group centers on events containing high energy muons. Particularly, the group specializes in events containing a pair of muons with large missing transverse energy. Such events will be important in searching for the Higg's boson, the elusive particle that is believed to be responsible for giving mass to all of us, and for physics beyond the Standard Model.

The main physics emphasis of the ALICE group is to use the tool of boson femtoscopy to study the space-time evolution of the system in proton+proton and lead+lead collisions, as well as to search for signatures for mini black hole formation in these collisions.