Valerie Halyo
Despite the striking success of the Standard Model (SM), there are many unsolved problems such as the large hierarchy in energy scales, the presence of dark matter throughout the universe, and the origin of the many fundamental parameters. While in general we do not know what the relevant energy scale is for the solution of most of the above problems, the electroweak scale is pointing us to new phenomena at the TeV scale.
The most direct experimental path to the understanding of such issues uses particles of the highest achievable energies. Following this path, our Princeton High Energy group is deeply involved with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe the structure matter deeper than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV .
LHC will have the highest energy and the most intense beams in the world. Collisions will occur at a rate of 800 million times a second challenging the trigger system to efficiently select the interesting events. Collisions will happen at 40Mhz so that particles from one collision will still be traveling through the detector when the next collision occurs. Understanding what happens in these collisions is the key to the LHC's success.
I am currently involved in the Princeton Project which is responsible for the measurement and delivery of the Luminosity to CMS. The real time LHC performance and the overall normalization to the physics analyses would be provided by luminosity measurements based on the forward hadronic calorimeter (HF).
LHC will allow to explore the SM higgs in entire the SM phase space and search for supersymmetric particles which are constituent of the most popular extension of the SM. Other exotic models such as extra dimensions and TeV scale gravity/strings will also be studied. Acknowledging the enormous discovery potential of LHC, its likely we are at the edge of a revolutionary time for the physics of fundamental particle we all waited for.