This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award provides continuing support for a program of research for the High Energy Physics group at Syracuse University. The Syracuse HEP group is the only U.S. group on LHCb - an experiment at the LHC designed as the first to study b and c decays at a hadron collider, Its participation in LHCb has been concentrated in the Vertex Locator, Trigger, Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector, detector alignment, and physics simulation areas. The experiment will collect much larger samples of b-flavored hadrons in one year, in most channels, than have already been gathered in all other experiments. These samples could be crucial in pinpointing new physics and, at least, will set a lower mass scale to which new physics might contribute to flavor transitions. The Syracuse group is preparing an upgrade called Super-LHCb to match in time the plans for the upgrade of the LHC itself, called Super-LHC. Its participation is focused on new technology for the upgraded vertex detector and associated trigger strategies. It also participate in RD50, an R&D collaboration aimed towards highly radiation resistant semiconductor detectors up to levels expected from Super-LHC.
