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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Texas Tech University

The Texas Tech University (TTU) joined the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experimental collaboration at the LHC in 1994. The TTU High Energy Physics Group has built the CMS Forward Calorimeters - the part of the system responsible for reconstructing and identifying particles whose flight path lies in the proximity of the initial proton beams. Just like supersonic jets generate the sonic boom when they move faster than the speed of sound, particles emit light when they move faster than the speed of light in the calorimeter quartz fibers. We collect this light with highly sensitive photodetectors and make conclusions about particle energies and trajectories. When we catch all particles, we can reconstruct the complete picture of what happened in a high energy collision and thus determine whether we see something new and unexpected.

We have four faculty members (Akchurin, Lee, Volobouev, and Wigmans), an adjunct professor (Sill), three postdoctoral research associates, and several graduate students working on the CMS project. Our group is currently involved in the testing and commissioning of the CMS detector and its readout electronics. Our physics interests include searching for all kinds of new particles and interactions as well as reconstruction of the hypothesized Higgs boson whose experimental observation will confirm or disprove one of the cornerstone principles of the modern particle theory.