| The Large Hadron
Collider now being built at the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics promises discoveries of great scientific importance. This will
be the first particle accelerator with sufficiently high energy to enabl
e researchers to study fundamental interactions of a kind never before
observed - those responsible for giving particles mass. With its ability
to explore the mass/energy region of one trillion electron volts (1TeV),
the LHC will be instrumental in the completion of the Standard Model of
the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces.
The construction of the Large Hadron Collider is an international effort with collaborators from many countries. 20% of which are from the United States including a number here at the University of Iowa. The Collaborators from the University of Iowa ar e involved with the CMS portion of the LHC and are particularly involved with its Forward Calorimeter part of the Hadron Calorimeter. |
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| The Compact Muon
Solenoid (CMS):
CMS is a proton-proton dector designed to run at the highest luminosity in the LHC. The main features of the CMS are a muon system, an electromagnetic calorimeter, a central tracking, and a hadron calorimeter. One of the goals of the CMS project it to find the Higgs Boson HO which is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. |
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The completed LHC will have bunches of protons passing through each other 40 million times a second, and with each bunch crossing, 20 proton-proton collisions will occur on average, making 800 million collisions per second. No t all of these will produce interesting results. Most of the time, protons will just raze past each other. Head-on collisions will be quite rare, and the processes which produce new particles rarer still. The Higgs Boson, for example, is expected to appea r in just one of every 1013 collisions. That means that even with 800 million collisions a second, a Higgs boson would only appear about once every day. The data would then need to be searched in order to find that appearance. |
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