Purdue Particle Physics and the LHC and CMS

The Purdue Particle Physics group is an International leader in particle physics and is one of the top groups in the US and is a major group in the CMS experiment. The Purdue group has been in existence for 50 years and has been an important part of the evolution of our knowledge of particle physics and discovering the fundamental building blocks of matter including the discovery of the top quark which, although fundamental, has a mass of about 170 protons. The team of experimenters includes eight Purdue professors:
Virgil Barnes, Daniela Bortoletto, Arthur Garfinkel, Laszlo Gutay, Matthew Jones, David Miller, Norbert Neumeister, and Ian Shipsey as well as PhD research personnel, engineers, graduate students and undergraduate students. The group has an extensive clean room and other facilities for the design and fabrication of high precision microstructure particle detectors, particularly silicon detectors.

CMS experiment
The Purdue Group has made extensive contributions, in collaboration with other Universities and National Laboratories, to the design and fabrication of the CMS experiment over the last decade.

1. Design and fabrication of the active components of a 60 million channel silicon pixel detector
2. Development, fabrication and installation of a sophisticated radioactive source system to calibrate the CMS calorimeters
3. The design and fabrication of the massive muon end cap detectors
4. Installation and operation of a world wide grid computing system to analyze the 100 megabytes/second produced by the LHC. One of 7 US centers is based at Purdue and is part of the Teragrid.

The apparatus has now been installed and the experiment is ready for LHC operation. The group is now preparing for data analysis and participating in the exciting discoveries which are expected. The group has personnel based  at  the LHC at the International Laboratory CERN, in Geneva Switzerland, in addition to those based at Purdue. The use of the Web allows one in real time, from the desktop any where in the world, to participate in the operation of the LHC and the CMS experiment. We can monitor the quality of the data as it is being taken and pass that information back to the experts in charge of the apparatus 5000 miles away.
The CMS experiment is truly a global collaboration which uses state of the art detectors and global communication techniques to explore the innermost secrets of our Universe. The Purdue Particle Physics Group is at the very forefront of this exciting science.