This CAREER proposal requests support for the development of a new calorimeter trigger system to allow the D0 experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to take full advantage of its discovery potential. Run 2 will provide a new era of exploration and potential discovery at the energy frontier. The expanded capabilities of the detectors and the accelerator will allow the direct study of one of the most pressing issues in all of particle physics: the origin of mass. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs field provides a means of generating particle masses and spontaneously breaking the symmetry of the electroweak interaction. Precision measurements performed over the last decade have confirmed that something akin to the Standard Model process of mass generation must exist, but the Higgs boson, the physical manifestation of the Higgs field, has yet to be observed. Seeing it and measuring its properties would be an important step in our understanding of the fundamental structure of nature and should point the way toward a larger theory of which the Standard Model is only a part. Achieving the ambitious goal of discovering the Higgs boson is currently only possible at the Tevatron, provided that the amount of data delivered to the experiments is increased by an order of magnitude over that originally anticipated for the current run. This requires larger interaction rates resulting in increased detector backgrounds, and will force the experiment to be far more selective in the events written to permanent storage for analysis.
Additionally, funds are requested for a new initiative that would involve Columbia liberal arts students in the important dialog between scientists and the general public through a summer internship with the Fermilab public relations department. Education and outreach activities also include training the next generation of physicists through participation of graduate and undergraduate students in research projects. Just as importantly, though, it also involves strengthening the understanding of current research by the general public. This latter goal can best be achieved by involving non-scientists in the process. Among the enthusiastic and articulate group of students in the "Physics for Poets" class the PI teaches at Columbia, there is an excellent source of people who are interested in science but approach it from a liberal arts background. He proposes to take advantage of the unique perspective of these students by creating an internship to involve several students per year in the outreach work done at Fermilab.
