The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at CERN recently reached an important milestone, the insertion of "the tracker" into the core of the detector. The tracker measures the positions of the particles into the collider ring. Professor Jeremiah Mans of the School of Physics and Astronomy is a member of the large collaboration CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) that will take measurements on the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Mans described the tracker as looking like an "enormous burrito wrapped in tinfoil" as it was transported in the middle of the night by special trucks to CERN. "Everything that is going into the detector is now below ground. It’s an exciting time."

CMS is one of the largest physics collaborations ever, and the LHC project is one of the largest non-industrial undertakings in history. The collaboration includes universities and government laboratories from around the world. It will be the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator. Its builders hope that the collisions at energies of 14 TeV will prove the existence of the theorized Higgs Boson and possibly observe new particles which would confirm the theory of Supersymmetry. (See Research spotlight, The Waiting Game.)

Mans jokes about being part of such a large collaboration. "It never seems like there is anyone around when you need to get some work done." Since the collaborators are spread out around the world in various locations they are rarely in the same place at the same time except during meetings. "I spend a lot of time on the phone in conference calls" and he points to a second clock on his wall which tells him the time at CERN so that he knows when to expect to be able to connect with colleagues at CERN.

Mans main jobs on CMS are the design, building and maintenance of the timing and laser control electronics and the data acquisition software for the Hadron Calorimeter which will measure the energies of quark-containing particles. The Calorimeter is assembled and has been installed on the ring, but is still subject to tweaking through software and "firmware" embedded in the detector electronics. Besides working on the detector itself, Mans and students in his group are preparing software to analyze the results from the first collisions. The physicists first simulate what they expect to discover in order to plausibly extrapolate what would constitute ground-breaking physics. Mans predicted that the first results seen from the LHC are not going to be groundbreaking. "We are going to be re-discovering the Standard Model for the first year," he says. "That way we can sift out apparatus effects when the collider is up and running." Mans stresses the need for physicists to be careful. "There are some indications from cosmic ray data that previous extrapolations for protons won’t work at LHC energies. We will need to come up with new extrapolations when the collider is running."