From DOE via FNAL: “U.S. joins the world in a new era of research at the Large Hadron Collider”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

The following news release about the restart of the Large Hadron Collider is being issued by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on behalf of the U.S. scientists working on the LHC. Fermilab serves as the U.S. hub for the CMS experiment at the LHC and the roughly 1,000 U.S. scientists who work on that experiment, including about 100 Fermilab employees. Fermilab is a Tier 1 computing center for LHC data and hosts a Remote Operations Center to process and analyze that data. Read more information about Fermilab’s role in the CMS experiment and the LHC. See a list of Fermilab scientists who can speak about the LHC.

One of the first collisions in the CMS detector at the record-high energy of 13 TeV, taken during testing for the second run of the Large Hadron Collider in late May. Image: CMS/CERN

New LHC data gives researchers from around the world their best chance yet to study the Higgs boson and search for dark matter and new particles.

Today scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European research facility, started recording data from the highest-energy particle collisions ever achieved on Earth.

LHC at CERN

This new proton collision data, the first recorded since 2012, will enable an international collaboration of researchers that includes more than 1,700 U.S. physicists to study the Higgs boson, search for dark matter and develop a more complete understanding of the laws of nature.

“Together with collaborators from around the world, scientists from roughly 100 U.S. universities and laboratories are exploring a previously unreachable realm of nature,” said James Siegrist, the U.S. Department of Energy’s associate director of science for high-energy physics. “We are very excited to be part of the international community that is pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe.”

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, reproduces conditions similar to those that existed immediately after the big bang. In 2012, during the LHC’s first run, scientists discovered the Higgs boson—a fundamental particle that helps explain why certain elementary particles have mass. U.S. scientists represent about 20 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, the two international teams that co-discovered the Higgs boson. Hundreds of U.S. scientists played vital roles in the Higgs discovery and will continue to study its remarkable properties.

ATLAS

CMS

Scientists will use this new LHC data to pin down properties of the Higgs boson and search for new physics and phenomena such as dark matter particles—an invisible form of matter that makes up 25 percent of the entire mass and energy of the universe. Physicists will also endeavor to answer questions such as: Why is there more matter than antimatter? Why is the Higgs boson so light? Are there additional types of Higgs particles? What did matter look like immediately after the big bang?

“NSF-funded researchers at ATLAS, CMS and LHCb are investigating some of nature’s most fundamental properties at collision energies never before explored.

LHCb

The potential for transformative discoveries is profound,” said Denise Caldwell, NSF’s division director for physics. “We eagerly look forward to LHC operation at almost twice the energy of any other particle accelerator on Earth.”

The LHC was turned off in early 2013, and engineers spent two years preparing the machine to collide particles at a much higher energy and intensity. During the shutdown, U.S. scientists and their international collaborators installed several new components in the four LHC detectors. These components, together with other upgrades, will allow physicists to record more information about the particles produced during the high-energy collisions.

These upgrades included a new detector in the heart of the ATLAS experiment, several new muon detectors on the outer shell of the CMS experiment, a new calorimeter inside the ALICE experiment and an innovative new data sorting system for the LHCb experiment.

ALICE

U.S. scientists played vital roles in the design and instrumentation of these new systems and will operate several of the detector components throughout the next three years of data collection.

Once collected at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the new LHC data travels the globe. New fiber optic cables recently installed by the U.S. Department of Energy bring the data to computers and data centers at 18 U.S. institutions, which provide 35 percent of the worldwide computing power for the CMS experiment and 23 percent for the ATLAS experiment.

The upgraded LHC will also generate data at a much faster rate. Scientists predict they will match the amount of data generated throughout the collider’s first three-year run within the next five months, eventually accumulating 10 times more data by the end of 2017. These collisions will also produce Higgs bosons 25 percent faster and will increase the chances of seeing other theoretical particles, such as those predicted for supersymmetry, by over 40 percent.

“The first three-year run of the LHC, which culminated with major discovery in July 2012, was only the start of our journey. It is time for new physics!” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “We have seen first data beginning to flow. Let’s see what they will reveal to us about how our universe works.”

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession. Serbia is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Union, JINR and UNESCO have Observer Status.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2015, its budget is $7.3 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 48,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards about $626 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

See the full article here.

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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab is America’s premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Thousands of scientists from universities and laboratories around the world
collaborate at Fermilab on experiments at the frontiers of discovery.

From FNAL- “From the CMS Center CMS: design, construction, operations”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014

Steve Nahn, U.S. CMS detector upgrade project manager, wrote this column.

It’s a very busy and sometimes hectic place on Wilson Hall’s 10th and 11th floors these days working on CMS. Rather than progressing sequentially through design, construction and operations phases of the CMS detector upgrades, we are going through all three simultaneously. This leads to a certain amount of jumping around.

CMS

The design component addresses the high-luminosity LHC era commencing in the mid-2020s, at which time the LHC’s total luminosity will increase 10-fold. To exploit the physics opportunities afforded by the more intense beam while coping with increased radiation dose, we must replace or upgrade key components of the detector. A large fraction of the collaboration spent the summer studying what sort of detector we would need in that demanding environment. The result, a 300-plus-page technical proposal, is nearly ready for release, and R&D efforts at Fermilab and collaborating institutes are already framing the technologies needed to make these Phase 2 upgrades a reality.

The construction component, the Phase 1 Upgrade Project, is a set of strategically targeted upgrades to cope with the imminent increased instantaneous luminosity starting next year and continually growing up to the high-luminosity LHC era. The design for this phase is complete, and the job at hand is to build the new sensors, back-end electronics and online triggering system. This project just went through Critical Decision 2 and 3 reviews simultaneously. The conclusion was a resounding recommendation for approval after a few technical details are resolved. The approval, which we hope will come through in November, will allow us to transition into production mode, launching activities at SiDet, Wilson Hall and the Feynman Center at Fermilab, as well as at the 30 collaborating U.S. universities, to move the project from design to installation in the next few years.

Lest we forget, there is the ongoing, operating experiment, perhaps the most exciting of the three phases. The LHC is poised to restart in spring 2015, after a two-year shutdown at twice the center-of-mass energy, the last significant step foreseen. The low mass of the Higgs argues for new physics that may appear in the next run, and the collaboration is gearing up to find it. This involves a program of extended running of the entire detector with cosmic rays before the beam returns to bring the detector back to peak efficiency, computing challenges to make sure the offline data production is ready, and increased effort on the analysis chain, particularly for potential early high-profile discoveries. A new discovery in 2015 would be fantastic, full stop, and we are committed to ensuring we are ready for such an opportunity.

There is indeed a lot of exciting work going on. And amid all this, there’s still one more thing to mention: Our fearless leader Patty McBride is transitioning from U.S. CMS program manager into her role as head of the Particle Physics Division. We know she isn’t going far — only three floors down in Wilson Hall — but we’ll miss her anyway. We take this opportunity to give her a giant “thank you” for her leadership and tireless efforts up here on the 11th floor. PPD is lucky!

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Fermilab: “From the CMS Center – Getting ready for the second run of the LHC”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Kevin Burkett, acting head of the CMS Center, wrote this column.

The end of the LHC shutdown is now in sight, and members of CMS and machine experts are both beginning preparations for the restart of LHC operations in 2015. The current long shutdown started after the completion of LHC Run 1 in February 2013. Run 1 was a tremendous success, and the experiments are still completing all their analyses using the data accumulated during the run.

Last week LHC machine experts gathered near CERN in Evian, France, to discuss plans for LHC operation in 2015. While the final decision on the collision energy will come after hardware tests of the LHC magnets later this year, the goal will be to deliver collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. This is close to the design energy and a significant increase compared to the 8-TeV collisions in 2012. A second goal is to cut the time between collisions in half, from 50 to 25 nanoseconds.

Members of CMS have been active during the shutdown, performing maintenance and improving the detector, as well as working to improve the algorithms used to reconstruct and identify the particles produced in collisions. Experts in computing have focused on improving the efficiency and reliability of the infrastructure while developing new tools for users.

An important milestone in our preparation for the start of data taking in 2015 is the upcoming Computing, Software and Analysis challenge, or CSA14. Simulated data samples are placed at sites around the globe and analyzed by members of the experiment. As the name suggests, this challenge allows us to test the readiness of many of the key aspects of our computing, offline software and physics analysis. Special emphasis will be placed on new procedures for users to access data and on validation of the output from the improved reconstruction algorithms.

Fermilab’s Joel Butler will lead CSA14. The exercise will require significant work from US CMS computing personnel, especially from the Scientific Computing Division. University members of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab will also be active in CSA14 analysis. With time to address any issues uncovered in CSA14, CMS will be ready to go when the LHC starts up again in 2015.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Fermilab- “Frontier Science Result: CMS Connecting the dots”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Dr. Don Lincoln wrote this article

When two protons collide in the center of the CMS detector, the collision energy can create hundreds of electrically charged particles. These particles roar through the apparatus, crossing individual detector elements. Each particle marks the location of its passage, leaving a string of dots that can be seen on a computer screen.

CMS at CERN

One of the trickiest jobs in particle physics is to teach a computer how to connect the dots and reconstruct the tracks of all of the particles that exited the collision. That’s correct: The child’s simple pastime of connect-the-dots can consume the efforts of many of the finest minds in an experiment like CMS. The difficulty stems from the fact that there are hundreds of tracks and that, in a bit of an inconvenient oversight, nobody bothered to put numbers beside the dots to tell the computer which to connect.

Reconstructing tracks is one of the first tasks that an experiment must accomplish in order to begin to analyze the data. Before the tracks are identified, the data is a mess of little dots. Once the tracks are determined, scientists can begin to sort out the physical process that occurred by figuring out that this particle went this way while another particle went that.

In addition to reconstructing the tracks of particles, scientists also reconstruct the origin of the particles. This is the location at which the collision between two protons occurred. Until you know the origin and trajectory of the particles, you can’t even begin to understand what sort of collision was recorded.

CMS scientists have worked long and hard to develop the algorithms to accomplish these challenging tasks. In a recent paper, they described the result of their efforts. Particles leaving the collision at angles near 90 degrees measured from the beam can be reconstructed about 94 percent of the time. For the special case of isolated muons, the reconstruction probability rises to 100 percent. The location of the origin of the collision can be localized with a precision about 0.01 millimeters, or about half the size of the finest human hair. These algorithms are fast and flexible, and scientists continue to improve on them in anticipation of the resumption of operations in early 2015.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Fermilab- “Frontier Science Result CMS: Times have really changed

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Today’s article was written by Don Lincoln

I remember the day in 1995 when the discovery of the top quark was announced at Fermilab. There were reporters. There was champagne. There was a raucous party. It was a big deal, the likes of which are seen once every decade or two.

Top Quark Antitop Quark event

At the time, the top quark discovery was not seen as just another study of the strong force. But for all the buzz, that’s really what it was. A quark and antiquark fused to make a gluon, which then converted into a top quark-antiquark pair. At some level, the physics was pretty mundane. (Of course, this didn’t stop us celebrating the discovery!)

The reason the top quark was so hard to find at Fermilab was that its mass is so big; it was hard to make with the Tevatron of the early 1990s. At the Large Hadron Collider, which came online in 2008, things are different. The LHC has higher energy — high enough that making top quarks is now relatively common. In CMS, top quarks are produced at a rate of about one per second.

LHC

Quantum chromodynamics, which scientists have been studying since the 1970s, is the theory of the strong force, and it governs the behavior of quarks and gluons. Scientists would like to know whether this well-studied QCD theory correctly predicts what is seen in top quark production, just as it does for other, lighter quarks.

QCD predicts that, in addition to the “main event” in which a top quark-antiquark pair is made, other quarks and gluons are also produced. It’s kind of like when you slap your hand hard down into water. There’s all the main activity where your hand hits the surface, but there are also stray drops of water that fly around. QCD should be able to predict on average how many extra “drops” of quarks and gluons are produced.

This measurement goes beyond simply testing QCD. Many new physics theories predict that events in which top quarks are produced might be a good place to look for, for instance, events with Higgs bosons or that reveal supersymmetry.

Standard Model of Supersymmetry

CMS scientists took a couple of data samples containing more than 100,000 top quarks and quantified the presence or absence of other quarks and gluons. The data was in very good agreement with the predictions of QCD, which means there was no big discovery. Nevertheless, the data verified that QCD is a good theory of top quark production, so we can be that much more confident about any future discoveries that hinge on the presence of top quarks.

It is often said in particle physics that yesterday’s discovery is today’s calibration point and tomorrow’s annoying background. For those of us who were part of the top quark discovery, we can but shake our heads. It’s hard to imagine that the top quark has so quickly become yet another tool to explore our universe. And yet it has. That’s a good thing.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Don Lincoln at Fermilab – Video about CMS at Fermilab

Don Lincoln has provided us with a video about the U.S involvement in CMS at CERN

Enjoy the video and understand the U.S. contribution to basic scientific research.

From Fermilab: “Meeting the demands of a more powerful LHC”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Kevin Burkett, acting head of the CMS Center, wrote this column.

We are now past the halfway point of the LHC’s long shutdown, during which scientists and engineers have been upgrading the collider to smash proton beams at double the energy of its first run. While there is still plenty of work left to do, the LHC accelerator complex is on track to return in early 2015 with proton-proton collisions at close to the LHC design energy of 14 TeV, and the CMS experiment will be ready to record the events. Members of CMS recently gathered at CERN to develop detailed plans for recommissioning the experiment after the restart of the accelerator, leading to exciting possibilities for physics with the high-energy data we expect to record in 2015.

Back here at Fermilab, lab personnel and other members of CMS have been taking advantage of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. The facility’s unique capabilities attract both national and international collaborators to test their new detector designs in a controlled environment. The current experiments at the Test Beam Facility are an important step in the development of the upgraded detectors needed to deal with the higher luminosity expected from the LHC in the future.

One group of CMS collaborators is focused on an upgrade of the forward pixel detector, part of the system responsible for measuring the trajectories of particles as they emerge from the proton-proton collision. The group works with CMS colleagues from other countries on a high-rate beam test to study electronics for upgrades planned for late 2016 and beyond.

Other groups from CMS perform studies critical to the upgrade of the calorimetry system, which measures the energy of particles. These groups evaluate prototypes of detector electronics that will be used in a near-term upgrade of the calorimeter, as well as study new materials and innovative designs for a future upgrade of the forward calorimetry system.

The studies at Fermilab’s Test Beam Facility today will ensure that the CMS detector continues to perform well in the future, producing exciting physics for many years to come, and that Fermilab personnel will have a leading role in the effort.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Fermilab CMS: “CMS Center news”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013

Patricia McBride, head of the CMS Center, wrote this column.

The LHC is in the middle of a long shutdown period, and the CMS collaboration is busy preparing for the next run, which starts in 2015, while planning for detector upgrades during future long shutdowns. This week CMS scientists gathered at CERN to discuss plans and proposals for an upgrade to the CMS tracker for the high-luminosity LHC era. Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer plans to visit the CMS detector this Thursday and will have a chance to meet with Fermilab staff working at CERN.

CMS

The Fermilab CMS Center and LHC Physics Center have been a hub of activity over the past few weeks. Last week, the LPC hosted at Fermilab a workshop on “SUSY at the Near Energy Frontier.” The workshop brought together more than 80 SUSY experts from the LHC and theory community. They reviewed the status of searches for supersymmetry and discussed ways to maximize the SUSY discovery potential of the LHC run that will start in 2015. Seema Sharma, a Fermilab CMS Center research associate and an LPC Fellow, led the organizing committee with assistance from LPC colleagues and the Fermilab conference office.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Symmetry: “US participation in the Higgs discovery”

The search for the Higgs at experiments at the Large Hadron Collider was an international effort involving thousands of people, with physicists and engineers from US institutions playing a significant role throughout.

October 01, 2013
Don Lincoln

Don Lincoln

In 2012, the announcement of the Higgs particle rocked the world. A scientific discovery in which thousands of US scientists participated was blasted across the globe by over a thousand TV stations to more than a billion people. TIME magazine declared it to be the particle of the year and Fabiola Gianotti, leader of one of the teams who found it, a runner-up for person of the year. Science, the flagship journal of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, named it the breakthrough of the year.

This discovery was a really big deal—so big that the media and information firm Thomson Reuters has predicted that this year’s Nobel prize in physics will go to two scientists who predicted the Higgs boson’s existence back in the 1960s.

The data used to make this discovery was recorded at the Large Hadron Collider. Although the LHC is located at CERN in Europe, the discovery was an international one. Scientists from across the globe were involved in all stages of this discovery. More than 6000 researchers from institutions in more than 60 countries are currently participating in the LHC experiments.

US participation

Nearly 2000 physicists from the United States contributed to this effort; the United States provides more researchers than any other country. These scientists came from 96 US universities and research facilities in 33 states, plus Puerto Rico. Like all LHC collaborators, institutions in the United States built equipment at their home facilities and shipped them to CERN. American scientists also helped operate the experiments and played a major role in analyzing the data that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

There are examples where US scientists have had a key impact. For instance, Joe Incandela, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was in the international spotlight on July 4, 2012, when he announced the discovery of the new particle, as leader of a team of more than 3000 scientists on the CMS experiment.

The two detectors that independently discovered the Higgs particle, ATLAS and CMS, can be thought of as huge digital cameras, each one larger than a five-story building and weighing many thousands of tons. And they are no ordinary cameras. They have 100 million pixels each and can take 40 million pictures every second. By sifting through these pictures, scientists are able to better understand how the universe works.

Fully a third of the cost of building and operating these detectors is borne by the United States. Together, the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation contributed about $165 million to the construction of each device. These two agencies have a long history of funding fundamental research, resulting in technical payoffs including such innovations as medical imaging and cancer treatment, materials science and high-performance computing.

While the United States has supplied about 30 percent of the budget and manpower necessary to operate the LHC experiments, this number probably underestimates the impact of US scientists on the LHC research program. Brookhaven National Laboratory provides the second largest group of physicists working on the ATLAS experiment, eclipsed only by CERN itself. The situation is similar in CMS, where Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is the second biggest research group.

Hundreds of American graduate students have written their PhD theses on research tied to the LHC experiments and have moved on into the American technical workforce.

America’s strong commitment to fundamental research ensures that US physicists will continue to play a central role in mankind’s millennia-long efforts to understand our universe.

See the full article here.

Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.

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From Fermilab: “U.S. institutions collaborate on new CMS pixel detector”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Monday, Sept. 9, 2013
Laura Dattaro

At the heart of the four-and-a-half-story-high particle detector of the CMS experiment at CERN is a collection of millions of tiny silicon devices known collectively as the pixel detector. When the LHC restarts after a planned shutdown from the end of 2016 to the middle of 2017, it will feature a brand-new pixel detector designed and built by a team at Fermilab in collaboration with 19 U.S. universities and more abroad.

CMS

The new detector is part of an upgrade plan that, after a successful review at the end of August, is slated to receive the Department of Energy’s second stage of approval. Known as Critical Decision-1, the review covered the overall scale of the cost and schedule of the construction.

The pixel detector is the particle detection system closest to the collision point. It measures the position of particles as they make their way through the detector with a precision better than one-tenth the size of a human hair . This helps scientists distinguish bottom quarks—which are produced, for example, in the decay of a Higgs boson—from other types of quarks.

“The pixel detector contributes significantly to the precision with which you extrapolate the tracks back to the collision point,” said Marco Verzocchi, a scientist at Fermilab who is on the project’s management team. “This helps you to identify the tracks that did not come from the collision point.”

The new pixel detector design ensures that the detector functions well when the upgraded LHC produces a much higher rate of proton-proton collisions. Its support structure will be built out of carbon fiber, a much lighter, less dense material than the current pixel detector’s aluminum. This means particles are less likely to hit one of the atoms that make up the detector, thus helping reduce the number of extraneous particles generated when particles coming from a collision do hit atoms in the detector material.

The CMS team also must update the readout electronics to cope with the higher collision and data rates that will arise from a more intense beam.

“The main reason for improving and replacing the pixel detector is to address the problem with the data rates,” Verzocchi said. “We’re going to profit from the lessons we learned in building the first detector.”

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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