The Energy Frontier
 |
| Lead-tungstate crystals for the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL). The Minnesota group of Professor Rusack has major responsibilities for the photodetectors that read out the 80,000 crystals of the ECAL. Based largely on the pioneering development of CMS, lead-tungstate crystals have been adopted for another project with Minnesota leadership: the electromagnetic calorimeter of the BTeV experiment at Fermilab. |
The relentless march of particle physics has been toward larger and more powerful particle accelerators. The crossing of a new energy frontier has often been marked with one or more dramatic discoveries. We expect this pattern to repeat as we cross into the TeV (tera-electron-volt) energy regime with the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in about five years. The LHC's principal goal is the discovery and study of the Higgs particle, the key to generating mass in the Standard Model. There may be other discoveries in this region as well, such as the particles predicted by supersymmetry (SUSY). The LHC's very high luminosity (collision rate) may open the window on processes which have so far been too rare to observe. Minnesota (Professors Cushman and Rusack) is an important contributor to CMS, one of two major LHC detectors. The groups contributions center on the development, refinement, production, and testing of photodetectors for the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) and the hadron calorimeter (HCAL). The group is also involved in CMS software development and has built and operates a Californium-252 irradiation facility, which tests the "radiation hardness" of various components of the detector under bombardment by neutrons. The physics of the Higgs and other objects at the TeV scale is expected to be rich, and there is a growing worldwide consensus that detailed measurements will require another facility, a linear electron-positron collider of about 1 TeV total energy. The accelerator challenges of such a project are formidable, and there is a beginning effort at Minnesota (Professor Poling) to contribute to this research.
Related Links