The Northern Illinois University group is completing its transition from the D0 experiment at Fermilab to the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as its core program. On ATLAS, Northern Illinois has operational responsibilities and electronics upgrades for hadron calorimetry (the ATLAS TileCal) and in simulation and algorithm development for the Fast TracKer (FTK) Trigger. These activities are central to the improved performance of ATLAS as the luminosity of the LHC increases. The NIU program of physics analysis focuses on studies of top quarks, vector bosons (W/Z), and direct photon production. They are also involved in the search for the decays of Higgs bosons into tau leptons, which could be an indicator of new, Beyond-the-Standard-Model phenomena.
The Northern Illinois group continues to be very active in detector development, particularly in the domain of calorimetry and muon detection, and has joined the Fermilab Mu2e experiment, among whose objectives is the search for muon conversion into electrons and hence lepton number violation.
Outreach to K-12 teachers and the general public is an integral part of the Northern Illinois program. The group initiated physics outreach on the campus in 2001, a program of effort that is now merged into the university's STEM outreach program. And, since 2008, the group has maintained an active center for QuarkNet, involving teachers and students in hands-on experimentation.
