This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award will fund the research work of Kravchenko Ilya at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln on the CMS experiment at the LHC. The focus of the proposal is the upgrade of the Level 1 (L1) trigger of CMS by including information from the Pixel Detector already at L1. The Level 1 trigger needs to operate in real time and sample interactions at a 40 MHz rate making a determination if the interaction that took place is of physics interest and should be kept for further investigation. The proposal includes the R&D needed for such addition, as well as the physical implementation and testing of the hardware. The CMS upgrade is planned to be executed in two phases. The first phase should be completed in four to five years and this proposal covers all stages from the design and system definitions up to and including the start of construction. The second phase will take an additional four to five years and this proposal covers the period up to the completion of the conceptual design and studies needed to define the project in detail. The addition of tracking to the L1 trigger system of CMS, integrated with the calorimeter and L1 muon trigger, will require original thinking and development of new algorithms and electronics components. The outcome will help to ensure the success of the CMS Physics Program by facilitating collection of larger and cleaner data sets.
This award will also fund the group effort in CMS data analysis. The first step in the analysis effort will be to gain understanding of the detector and the event environment of pp collisions at 14 TeV. This will be done by measuring W and Z properties. Once this work is done the plan is to proceed and investigate WW/ZZ final states. The more distant goal is the observation of Higgs boson decays to WW/ZZ, or observation of non-standard model particles decaying to these final states.
The research program also involves supporting the operations and commissioning for the existing silicon Pixel Detector of CMS, and the CMS data taking. The research program will support the University of Nebraska - Lincoln undergraduate students of Physics and Electrical Engineering majors participation in the R&D at the Silicon Laboratory on campus. The group plans to reach broader circles of UNL students by giving seminars on LHC physics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The project is cross-disciplinary, and will involve the Electrical Engineering Department of UNL in addition to the Physics Department. This effort will require close collaboration with several US universities, and researchers at FNAL, CERN and PSI - Zurich, expanding their ties to UNL.
