ATLAS Phase-I Upgrades

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva Switzerland is the world's premier particle collider facility in operation. By recording the collisions of protons at the LHC, the ATLAS experiment studies nature at the shortest distances and highest masses ever accessible in a laboratory. In essence, it is simultaneously the world's most powerful microscope and an experiment creating conditions that existed in nature only near the time of the Big Bang. Studies there have already led to discovery of a new fundamental particle, the Higgs Boson. This discovery is of such high scientific impact that the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to the people who first predicted the existence of this particle. This NSF award enables upgrades of the ATLAS experimental apparatus needed for high precision studies of Higgs Boson properties and a wide variety of searches for particles needed to explain unresolved puzzles. An example of one such puzzle is "What is the dark matter which makes up nearly 30% of the universe"? There are many other similar questions. The next three years represent a transition of the LHC physics program from a collision energy of 8 Teraelectronvolts (TeV) data-taking and operation, to extended operations and data taking at nearly double the energy, 13-14 TeV. Over a thousand scientists from the United States are involved with this scientific program on several major experiments. This award provides support for Dr. Hobbs at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his collaborators at three U.S. universities to upgrade the ATLAS detector so that it can continue to operate efficiently at higher energies for a longer time and at a higher rate. This upgrade will enable scientists to collect data to search for new physics to explain inconsistencies in the particle theory that arise as the energy is increased and to fully understand how the Higgs boson fits into a fundamental theory of the universe. The universities supported by this award will build new instrumentation to be installed in the ATLAS detector, which is necessary in order to carry out a real-time selection and collection of data and provide a better measurement of particle energies. In addition to producing results which advance fundamental scientific knowledge, the work associated with these upgrades trains students, young researchers and technicians to carry out basic research by formulating questions and procedures to understand what is not known, and it also trains them to develop and operate complex, custom electronics systems and advanced computer algorithms needed to sustain extremely high data rates and classify large, complex data sets in fractions of a second.