The University of Notre Dame High Energy Physics Group is committed to the exploration of the energy frontier in particle physics with accelerator-based experiments. The group is engaged in several related projects using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN Laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland, the highest energy accelerator in the world. The group is also active in future critical upgrades of the CMS detector and and Education and Outreach through QuarkNet and many other public-facing initiatives. Together these activities place the group at the forefront of both particle physics experimentation and outreach. This award will facilitate further developments in the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model, one of the highest priority quests in physics for the 21st century.
The CMS experiment has recently begun the first physics run at 13 TeV center of mass energy, accumulating initial data from an LHC dataset that should exceed 100 fb-1 over the next few years. This dataset represents an unprecedented opportunity for physics studies at the electroweak scale and opens a potentially dramatic era in the search for new physics. For its analytical contributions, the Notre Dame group has taken a leading role in several analyses at the forefront of the Higgs discovery and searches for new phenomena. This award will continue this group's broad technical contributions, including: electromagnetic calorimeter operations and management of the U.S. contributions; leadership in High Level Trigger monitoring; leadership in the CMS Simulation effort and in Data Preservation; research and development for experimental upgrades of CMS calorimetry for improved performance at high luminosity; and in Computing, the group holds a U.S. CMS management position related to university-based computing facilities. The centerpiece of the group's outreach efforts is QuarkNet, now in its eighteenth year. Notre Dame is one of three institutions leading this national project and is the managing institution. QuarkNet currently consists of 50 Centers in 25 States and Puerto Rico and has been expanded to include eleven different experimental programs at seven national and foreign laboratories. Through such efforts as QuarkNet, the particle physics field is creating a suite of outreach materials and demonstration projects that bring the excitement of particle physics, the "buzz" about the LHC, to the public on a number of levels, from real physics analysis on LHC Higgs data in the classroom to particle detectors on display in museums such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
