This award provides three years of funding to support the team of experimental particle physicists engaged in the high energy physics program at Cornell University. The intellectual merit is focused primarily upon the LHC and CMS in particular, but also includes the completion of physics programs at existing facilities (CLEO and CDF) and a technology development project for future ILC-type detectors. This mix of projects exploits the varied expertise of group members while balancing their responsibilities to bring existing efforts to a natural close, to provide thesis opportunities to graduate students and career development for postdocs and young faculty, to have a major impact upon LHC physics output, and to pave the way for the future. The broader impacts will include bringing the challenge and excitement of LHC physics into their extensive program of outreach: to local K-12 schools, including both in-school programs and out- of-school workshops for teachers, educators, and high school students; to the general public; and to undergraduates.
Particle physics uses high-energy particle colliders to study fundamental forces and fundamental types of matter. The highest energy available today is at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland, so that is where we carry out our research program. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built above all to discover the Higgs particle, and this is has done: the Higgs discovery was announced in 2012, and the Nobel prize already awarded. But there is more to be studied than the Higgs. The Cornell University particle physics group is focussed on looking for what we call "New Physics" -- phenomena that lie beyond what we currently know and can explain. These phenomena might include new forces, new kinds of matter, additional dimensions of space, or many other possibilities. We have looked most closely for a kind of New Physics that would reveal itself more by what is unseen than by what is seen. We look in the data, in other words, for cases where there is indication of a high energy collision -- with clear evidence that some particles have simply gone missing. The most mundane way for this to happen involves neutrinos. Neutrinos pass through our detectors without leaving a trace, and since they may carry large amounts of energy and momentum, the amount of missing "stuff" can be very significant. We find these, but then we look further for cases where really large amounts of energy and momentum have gone missing. Such cases would be evidence that we may have produced Dark Matter in the powerful LHC collisions. If we can find evidence of that kind, we have a starting point to study Dark Matter and come to understand what it is. Dark Matter is an unknown substance that has been observed only through its gravitational effects in the universe. Indeed, most of the beautiful sights we see on a starry night are the result of Dark Matter that, over a few billion years of the universe's history gravitationally pulled together large amounts of normal matter to create galaxies and galaxy clusters. We thus see its effects and astrophysicists can measure quite precisely how much Dark Matter is in the universe. But we don't know what it is -- and that, we believe, is a problem for particle physics. So far, the high energy collisions at the LHC have not produced any Dark Matter that we have been able to detect. While this is a bit disappointing, we have by no means exhausted the possibilities. Most importantly, we have not yet reached the highest energies the LHC is capable of, and we won't get there until 2015. When the current upgrades are completed at that time, the LHC will come back on at full energy and we will resume the search for Dark Matter, as well as for any other evidence of New Physics that may appear in the data. While we continue these searches in the data, we also work on the technical research and development that is needed to design and build new detectors to operate in the future when yet further upgrades will be made to the LHC. In these endeavours we push the envelope of current technology in both micro-electronics and in computing. And in addition to that, we also study the LHC data to make better and more precise measurements of the fundamental parameters of particle physics upon which so much else depends in the field -- including any future discoveries of New Physics. One of the most important products of our work is the team of young scientists that we train. Many of these young people go on to work in particle physics, but equally as many move out into fields ranging from other areas of basic scientific research to more practical (but usually highly technical) fields in computing, software, finance, government, and countless other areas. By this means the public investment in fields of pure research, such as particle physics, yields its short-term return to society.
