Rice University Leads $15.5 Million Project to Advance Large Hadron Collider Research
by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 22, 2024

Rice University's physics team, under the leadership of Wei Li, has received a $15.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Physics to spearhead upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) program. This initiative marks a major step in high-energy nuclear physics exploration.

The grant will support the creation of an ultra-fast silicon timing detector, the endcap timing layer (ETL), vital for the CMS experiment at CERN. Alongside Wei Li, the project involves Frank Geurts, Nicole Lewis, and Mike Matveev from Rice, collaborating with MIT, Oak Ridge National Lab, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Kansas.

Li emphasizes the ETL's role in unlocking the mysteries of the quark-gluon plasma and understanding the strong nuclear force. The ETL, consisting of two disks on each side of the CMS detector, represents a significant portion of the global ETL initiative, achieving a time resolution of 30 picoseconds per particle.

This advancement is critical for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), set to launch in 2029, enhancing the collider's data output by tenfold. The increased luminosity will enable detailed studies of the Higgs boson and the search for phenomena such as extra dimensions and dark matter constituents.

The ETL project not only augments LHC research but also complements other cutting-edge projects like the electron-ion collider at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. This collaborative effort is poised to redefine our understanding of fundamental physics over the next decade.

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