Experimental High Energy Physics

High Energy Physics seeks to answer questions about the smallest units of matter. Our current understanding is that everything in the universe is built up from fundamental particles called quarks and leptons, which interact via the exchange of field particles such as the photon (responsible for the electromagnetic force), the Weak Bosons, W and Z (the weak nuclear force), and the gluon (the strong nuclear force).

The singular achievement of High Energy Physics, The Standard Model explains all our observations so far in a simple and straighforward way, much as Mendeleev's Periodic Table did in the 19th century.

There are many questions that the Standard Model leaves unanswered, or partially answered. Quantites like mass and charge are assigned empirically. We have no idea why there are so many quarks and leptons (while the entire stable universe is built from the two lightest quarks, and lightest charged lepton -- the electron). We do not quite understand why the universe came to be dominated by matter (the Standard Model treats matter and antimatter nearly equally).

Answering these questions requires probing matter at very small distances. This requires very high energies. Our work inevitably centers around large particle accelerator centers such as Fermilab in Batavia IL, SLAC in Stanford CA, CERN in Switzerland, or alternatively at large detector arrays, such as those at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, that observe the cosmic sources of high energy particles.

CDF is a collider detector. It weighs about 5000 metric tons, located at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. Its cylindrical shape surrounds a spot where protons and antiprotons are brought into collision at nearly the speed of light. The Rutgers group is involved in many aspects of CDF including: Building the Silicon Vertex Detector Searches for Higgs Searches for Supersymmetric particles Investigations of top quark production Hyperon polarization

HiRes The High Resolution Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector is an atmospheric fluorescence detector that observes high energy particle interactions in the upper atmosphere. These particles can have energies 10 million times higher than colliders. The Rutgers group is involved in: Flash ADC detection of cosmic-ray air showers Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays at the GZK limit Chemical composition of cosmic rays Cosmology, cosmic-ray sources and anisotropies

CMS is a collider detector being built at the LHC collider at CERN. It weighs about 12000 metric tons, and will start studying proton-proton interactions at energies seven times higher than the Tevatron. The Rutgers group has helped build crucial hardware for the CMS detector, and is preparing for exciting physics results. CMS Forward Pixels / Token Bit Manager BCM and PLT detectors Diamond detectors CMS Physics

TALE The Telescope Array and TA Low-Energy Extension will be a hybrid ultrahigh energy cosmic-ray detector composed of both atmospheric fluorescence detectors and a ground array of scintillation counters. It will extend to lower energies than HiRes, allowing a better analysis of the many features in the cosmic-ray spectrum above 3x1016 eV.

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Updated Feb 20, 2007