IU Physicists Upgrade CERN Collider for 10 Times More Data as U.S. Backs $300 Million Share
Updated
Updated · Mirage News · Jul 28
IU Physicists Upgrade CERN Collider for 10 Times More Data as U.S. Backs $300 Million Share
1 articles · Updated · Mirage News · Jul 28
Summary
Indiana University physicists are preparing to install new ATLAS detector components during the Large Hadron Collider’s roughly three-year shutdown, part of a rebuild aimed at probing matter’s most basic structure.
The upgrade will let the detector process about 10 times more collision data per second as CERN pushes the LHC to deliver far more intense proton beams.
IU’s Harold Evans is deputy project manager for the U.S. share of the effort—about $300 million—and his team is building machine-learning algorithms on detector-mounted chips to filter collisions in billionths of a second.
That added sensitivity is meant to test gaps in the Standard Model, including dark matter and neutrino puzzles, and to improve the odds of spotting extremely rare double-Higgs events or clues to supersymmetry.
ATLAS, one of the LHC’s two general-purpose detectors, includes about 245 institutions from more than 40 countries; the collider’s just-completed Run 3 logged more than twice the collision data of Runs 1 and 2 combined.