UMD Scientist Continues 'Atom Smashing' Leadership of U.S. Collaboration for CMS

	Pictured Left to right in the CMS dectector are UMD graduate students Elizabeth Twedt and Malina Kirn, postdoc Jeff Temple and UMD Physics Professor Nick Hadley, chair of the U.S. CMS Collaboration Board. Image Credit: University of Maryland. . Click here larger image.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- An epic scientific exploration is underway in Geneva Switzerland, where physicists are using the largest machine ever devised, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, to study the world's tiniest particles. The goal is to fill gaps in our understanding of the fundamental nature of physical reality through two experiments, CMS and Atlas.

Leading the U.S. research collaboration for the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment is University of Maryland Physics Professor Nicholas Hadley, who recently was re-elected to a third term as the chair of the U.S. CMS Collaboration Board. As chair, Hadley will continue to represent and guide the nearly 700 scientists from 49 universities and national laboratories in the United States who are members of the CMS experiment at the LHC. U.S. collaboration members represent about a third of the CMS experiment membership.

"The Large Hadron Collider at CERN smashes protons together at close to the speed of light with four times the energy of the most powerful accelerators built up to now," explains Hadley. "Some of the collision energy is turned into mass, creating new particles, which can be observed in the CMS particle detector. CMS data is analyzed by scientists around the world to build up a picture of what happened at the heart of the collision. This will help us answer questions such as: 'what is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it?' and 'what gives everything substance?'.

"This work will increase our basic understanding of matter and the Universe and could even revolutionize that understanding, Hadley says. The findings may also spark new technologies that change the world we live in."

Under Hadley's leadership, the U.S. collaboration has made and continues to make significant contributions to nearly every aspect of the detector from construction and installation to operation. The U.S. CMS also plays a major role in operation of the experiments computing facilities and software used to analyze unprecedented amounts of data from the CMS. These highly sophisticated computing tools allow physicists to operate the CMS detector, reconstruct the data, analyze it and, ultimately, make discoveries.

Hadley has conducted extensive research in various aspects of particle physics. He was a co-head of one of the two research groups at Fermilab that discovered the top quark in 1995. The Standard Model of particle physics holds that all matter is made from a small alphabet of elementary particles consisting of six quarks and six leptons. The heaviest of these, the top (or t) quark, is unstable and can only be detected when it is created artificially, for example, as happened in the collisions between the high-energy proton and antiproton beams at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

The US-CMS Collaboration Board, for which Hadley is again chairman, oversees policy for the US scientists working on the CMS experiment. He has also worked on a remote operations center that enables scientists to participate in detector operations without having to travel to CERN. He is one of four top physicists from the University of Maryland working on the CMS experiment. For more about UMD at the LHC click here.

The CMS detector is the size of a five story building, weighs more than 12,500 tons and is located in a cavern 100 yards underground near Geneva Switzerland. The experiment was built by a team of more than 1900 scientists from 39 countries and 181 institutions. CMS is one of two general-purpose experiments at the LHC that have been built to search for new physics. It is designed to detect a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in the LHC's high-energy proton-proton collisions and will help to answer questions such as: What is the Universe really made of and what forces act within it? It will also measure the properties of well known particles with unprecedented precision and be on the lookout for completely new, unpredicted phenomena.

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