Carnegie Mellon University physicists in Pittsburgh are one step closer to building new particle detectors for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
A team led by John Alison, an assistant professor in physics, and Manfred Paulini, a professor of physics and the Mellon College of Science associate dean for faculty and graduate affairs, has successfully built and tested prototypes for the High-Granularity Calorimeter (HGC), an upgrade to the current CMS detector. On the one hand, building functional prototypes is a major milestone several years in the making. On the other hand, the milestone is the first step in a manufacturing project that will take place over the next three years.
"CMS can be thought of as a large 3D camera that records the products of the proton-proton collisions provided by the LHC," Alison said. "For example, images collected from the detector were used to discover the Higgs boson in 2012."
Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, a major focus of the particle physics has been in studying the properties of the Higgs boson in detail and searching for new particles not predicted by the standard model of particle physics. Comparing measurements to predictions will allow new theories to be tested but more data is needed.
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