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 > UC Santa Cruz

University of California, Santa Cruz

The Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz was a member of the initial group of US institutions that petitioned the US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation to support US participation in LHC experiments due to the great potential for exciting research. We joined the ATLAS experiment in 1994. Our work has focused on the inner tracker of the ATLAS detector and, by joining at an early stage in its development, we were able to contribute to its specification, design and construction.

Our physicists, staff and students have worked on development of the tracker's radiation-hard silicon sensors and the radiation-hard readout electronics, two areas that we have specialized in for the past 20 years. During the construction phase, we were responsible for testing the custom-designed readout integrated circuits (ICs) and assembling and then testing the multi-IC hybrid circuits that became part of each detector module (4,088 in total for the whole detector).

The group's principal physics interest is in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, especially from theories with supersymmetry. We are currently studying W/Z + jets events with electrons in the final state as a means of calibrating detector performance and developing data analysis techniques. Many signatures of supersymmetry are similar to these Standard Model events. Group members also work on improving measurements of jet energies and evaluating the performance of the inner detector in tracking the particles emitted from proton collisions in the center of ATLAS.

Our ATLAS group now consists of six senior physicists (faculty and researchers), two postdoctoral researchers and four graduate students. We expect to add more graduate students in the next few years as the LHC becomes operational.