OXFORD, Miss. – Seven University of Mississippi
physicists have kept a keen eye on a huge
construction project in Switzerland this week.
Researchers at the European Organization for
Nuclear Research, known as CERN, lowered the final
piece of the Compact Muon Solenoid particle
detector into its experimental cavern 328 feet
underground on Tuesday (Jan. 22).
The UM physics professors are among some 1,500 scientists
from 155 institutes in 36 countries working with Fermilab
to build the CMS, one of the experiments preparing to take
data at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin
operating this summer. UM has received funding for this
project since 1991 from the U.S. Department of Energy.
This final piece is a large disk, nearly 45 feet in
diameter, with an asymmetrical cap on one face that
fits into the central barrel of the experiment. The
whole assembly weighs about 1,430 tons. It includes
fragile detectors to help identify and measure the
energy of particles created in LHC collisions.
“The University of Mississippi is a founding member
of the CMS experiment, having built fiber optical
splicers and electronic cooling boxes for the CMS
Hadron Calorimeter, which sits within the large
solenoidal magnet,” said Lucien Cremaldi, a UM
physics professor who has been closely involved
with the installation progress at CERN. Other UM
professors in the Hadron Calorimeter group are Jim
Reidy, Rob Kroeger, Don Summers, Breese Quinn,
Romulus Godang and David Sanders.
“We have been building the CMS detector for nearly
a decade, and now we’re 99.8 percent done,” said
Fermilab physicist Dan Green, construction project
manager for U.S. CMS and chair-elect of the
collaboration board. “The first collisions are just
around the corner.”
CMS is the first experiment of its kind to be
constructed above ground and then lowered, piece by
piece, into a cavern below. After eight years of
work in the surface hall, the lowering of this
final piece moves CMS into its final commissioning
stage.
For this last large piece, scientists at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison designed the large
iron disks that help guide the magnetic field
created by the detector’s powerful solenoid
magnet.
“From the design to the construction, we were
involved all the way,” said physicist Dick Loveless
of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who watched
as the huge gantry crane lowered the disk. “It was
phenomenal to see this last piece go down.
Everything went down without excitement, which is
exactly what we want.”
American universities designed and built the
cathode strip chambers that are bolted onto the
disks. These chambers accurately track muons, the
heavier versions of electrons that indicate
interesting collisions. U.S. funding also
contributed to the plastic scintillating layers and
all the electronics in the hadron calorimeter, part
of which is the “nose” of the disk that absorbs and
measures energies of all particles flying through
the detector.
From shedding light on dark matter to searching for
extra dimensions of space, experiments at the LHC
promise to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of
the universe.
“This is a very exciting time for physics,” said
CMS spokesman Tejinder Virdee. “The LHC is poised
to take us to a new level of understanding our
universe.”
Photos and a video of the descent are available at
http://www.fnal.gov/pub//presspass/images/CMSlastpiecelowered.html.
For photos and graphics of the Compact Muon
Solenoid Hadron Calorimeter or Pixel Detector,
visit http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/cmseye.
For more information about physics education and
research at UM, go to
http://www.olemiss.edu/depst/physics?and?astronomy.