NSF Award
2411724
This award will provide support to a Northern Illinois University team working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC, which smashes pairs of protons together and ATLAS, a large particle detector, perform basic scientific research at the world's largest energies and smallest distances. One of the key goals of the ATLAS experiment is placing the Higgs boson, the last major piece of current particle physics theories to be discovered, under a microscope, in order to compare its properties to predictions from theory. In particular, this award will study Higgs bosons that decay into a pair of photons in order to search for new particles and production of pairs of Higgs bosons from a single proton-proton collision. The award will also enable the future ATLAS physics program at the HL-LHC, for which the experiment will receive significantly more proton-proton collisions at a time. The NIU group will focus on tracking (determining the trajectory of charged particles) for the HL-LHC trigger system, which will be responsible for rapidly deciding which data to record and which data can safely be rejected. As part of the award, the NIU team will also contribute significant outreach to K-12 students, teachers and the general public. The team will participate in an NIU QuarkNet center, and also continue its popular Physics of Sports lecture series for the general public.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
