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 > University of Iowa

University of Iowa

The University of Iowa High Energy Experimental Physics group has been a part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC since CMS was approved as an experiment in 1996. Four faculty members (Professors Yasar Onel, Ed Norbeck, Charles Newsom, and Jane Nachtman), three engineers (Paul Debbins, Michael Miller, and Ianos Schmidt), five postdoctoral research associates (Ugur Akgun, Kerem Cankocak, Alexi Mestvirishvili, Lalith Perera and Taylan Yetkin), five graduate students, and three undergraduate students are currently active on the project. We also lead a strong Quarknet program with participation from 28 teachers, including a summer internship program with three Iowa teachers and seven high school students each year. We have computing resources devoted to CMS physics analysis, including a proposed Tier-3 computing facility.

Our goal is to search for the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking, and we expect that the LHC will reveal hints in the form of the observation of new particles and interactions. We are involved in the search for the Higgs boson as predicted by the Standard Model and also by models of physics beyond the Standard Model. The most well-known of these models is Supersymmetry, which offers an explanation for remaining theoretical issues within the Standard Model, and is a leading candidate for observation at the LHC. We are participating in an analysis to search for the most likely manifestations of Supersymmetry: the production of supersymmetric partners of quarks and gluons, which give signatures of energetic jets and missing energy in the detector. Our studies of jets and missing energy may lead us to the observation of new physics with the first CMS data, whether it appears as evidence of supersymmetric particles or something entirely different.

Our group has been involved throughout the design and construction of the hadronic calorimeter (HCAL) through Professor Onel's role as US Project Coordinator for the forward HCAL during the initial phase. This major construction task was successfully completed on time. It was installed in the underground cavern at CERN at the end of 2006, and the HCAL has begun to take data with cosmic rays (as of summer 2006 at SX5 and October 2007 at UX5) in anticipation of proton-proton collisions from LHC. Our group continues to participate in remaining construction tasks as well as the commissioning and calibration of this detector. The hadronic calorimeter is crucial to the study of jets and missing energy, so correct understanding of its response is essential to early analysis efforts and detection of signals of new physics.

Professor E. Norbeck has joined the CMS in August 2001 to study Heavy Ion Collisions in the CMS detector. He is involved in the planning and construction of the ZDC (Zero Degree Calorimeters) and CASTOR Detectors.

Our group has also been involved in development of the silicon tracking detector, namely in the use of silicon pixel detectors, since Professor C. Newsom joined the group in 2005. Precision tracking which is robust against damage from residual radiation from the colliding protons will be crucial to reconstructing the Higgs boson, an essential component of the CMS physics goals.

More information can be found at these websites: