The CMS Experiment at CERN
- Permanent members -- T. Adams, Y. Gershtein, S. Hagopian, V. Hagopian, K. Johnson, H. Prosper, and H.D. Wahl
- Post Doctoral Fellows -- Andrew Askew, Oleksiy Attramentov
- Staff – M. Bertoldi and Blake Sharin
- Graduate students – Sergei Gleyzer and Jeff Haas
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a next generation detector for the new proton-proton collider (7 TeV + 7 TeV) called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being constructed in the existing 27 km circular underground tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland. This collider will have the highest center of mass energy and have a luminosity of 10-34cm-2sec-1. The two general-purpose detectors are the CMS and ATLAS, which are designed to detect the Higgs particle, dark matter as well as a host of new particles, such as supersymmetric partners of the standard family of elementary particles. The collisions will also produce copious amounts of top quarks, be a B physics factory and have large amounts of W's and Z's. The collider is scheduled to start taking data by December 2007 or early 2008.
The Florida State University is a member of the international collaboration that designed, built, installed and now calibrating the CMS detector. This solenoidal detector has a diameter of about 14 meters, a length of 20 meters and weighs 12,000 tons. The magnet inside the detector has a 4-tesla field inside a solenoidal volume of 6-meter diameter and about 13 meters long. The detector has 4 major subsystems. 1. The tracking sub-system made of silicon including a vertex detector. 2. The electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) made of lead tungstate crystals. 3. The hadron calorimeter (HCAL) made of brass and scintillator and 4. The muon system composed of iron toroids. In addition the detector will have the state of the art data acquisition system, a trigger system, and on-line and off-line computing. Most components of the detector have been constructed, assembled and have been lowered into the large underground cavern getting ready for data taking.
The US institutions (~50) have major responsibility in the design and construction of the HCAL sub-system and the muon end cap sub-system. Our (FSU) group’s responsibilities are in ECAL and HCAL. We have constructed and assembled at FSU various components of the detector and have shipped them to CERN. Some parts were also sent to Fermilab, where several major components were constructed and assembled. For HCAL one of our major responsibilities is the calibration system that uses pulsed nitrogen laser, LED’s and radioactive wire source. We have participated in the CERN test beam effort since 1998. For ECAL our responsibility is improving the electromagnetic energy resolution. We also have an active group that uses neural network to extract physics signals.
The HCAL is in a high radiation area where active material, such as scintillator and optical fibers can get damaged. We at FSU have studied radiation damage of scintillators, plastics and quartz fibers for about a decade and working with industry have quantified and selected the most radiation resistant active materials. The availability of 4 tesla magnets at the FSU High Magnetic Filed Laboratory enabled us to measure the effect of magnetic fields on various detector components.
We have made a major commitment to this experiment and expect to reap many physics results once the experiment starts taking data. If you like more information on FSU share of this experiment, contact us at vasken@hep.fsu.edu.
You can visit the CMS home page at CMS home page .
Some diagrams and pictures from the CMS detector:
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Albert Einstein said:
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.
Niels Bohr said:
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it.
Max Born said:
No concealed parameters can be introduced with the help of which the indeterministic description could be transformed into a deterministic one. Hence if a future theory should be deterministic, it cannot be a modification of the present one but must be essentially different. |
