Back to the Future

Summer 2008 is the start of something big – and SMU will be there. The final pieces are being moved into place for possible August testing of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will recreate conditions at the beginning of the universe.

The LHC will be the site of several experiments in high-energy physics, but none is more imposing than the ATLAS Experiment. At about 42 meters long and weighing 7,000 tons, it fills a 12-story space beneath the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

As U.S. Coordinator for the ATLAS Experiment's Liquid Argon Calorimeter, Physics Chair Ryszard Stroynowski and Professors Robert Kehoe and Jingbo Ye are helping to seal the final details on the largest detector in the LHC array and supervising other SMU personnel in the design of computer software interfaces that will control the device, which measures energy deposited by the flying debris of smashed atoms. The SMU crew is also working on data processing for ATLAS' 220,000 channels of electronic signals – an information stream larger than the Internet traffic of a small country.

In addition, the researchers are preparing for analysis of the vast quantities of physics data the detectors will produce. "Out of 40 million events per second, we need 10 events per year," Stroynowski says. "We need to do extensive simulations of known physics to see the tiny deviations we're looking for. It's a very large computing challenge."

Among those entrusted with these tasks is a small army of SMU graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in physics, including Rozmin Daya, Kamile Dindar, Ana Firan, Daniel Goldin, Haleh Hadavand, Julia Hoffman, Yuriy Ilchenko, Renat Ishmukhametov, David Joffe, Azeddine Kasmi, Zhihua Liang, Peter Renkel, Ryan Rios and Pavel Zarzhitsky. Hoffman, Ishmukhametov and Joffe spent a working weekend greeting visitors, answering questions and even giving tours during CERN's "Day of Open Doors" celebration in April. An estimated 53,000 visitors crowded the organization's Geneva campus on the last day the public will be able to see the LHC facilities up close.

At the beginning of May, the areas will be sealed off in preparation for the first round of testing, currently scheduled for August 2008. From then on, the ATLAS Experiment will be controlled remotely by computer.