High Energy Experiment

The high energy experimental group is large and strong, consisting of eight faculty, nine postdoctoral researchers, eight Ph.D. students, and a supporting staff of a dozen engineers and technicians.They are among the leaders of several national and international collaborations. Funding comes primarily from the Department of Energy and totals more than a million dollars annually.

Research focuses on the fundamental particles and forces in the universe. These are the leptons, like the electron and muon, and the quarks from which the stronglv interacting particles such as protons and neutrons are composed. To get these tiny particles close enough for the fundamental forces to dominate the interactions between them, particle energies of hundreds to thousands of GeV are required. Since particle accelerators and detectors are complex and expensive devices, these experiments are usually performed at large national and international laboratories.

Professors Can, Honscheid, Kagan, and Kass are exploring electron-positron annihilations using the CLEO II detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring at Cornell University. This experiment is concentrating on the study of heavy quark and leptons, particularly the b quark and tau lepton. The CLEO II experiment is investigating rare decay processes, some of which have never been observed before. Rare decays of heavy quarks are of particular importance as they provide a window to new phenomena not otherwise accessible. The next generation of this experiment, CLEO III, will improve the sensitivity by one or two orders of magnitude, possibly leading to an observation of CP violation. The CLEO III detector is in the initial stages of construction and is scheduled for data taking in late 1997.

The Gan-Kagan-Kass collaboration is also leading a multidisciplinary, multi-national effort for the development of Chemical Vapor Deposition Diamond as an active and radiation-hard material for particle detection. The detectors are presently being prototyped for use at experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a future collider being built at the European laboratory for particle physics, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Professors Durkin and Ling are involved in an international collaboration to study the physics of electron-proton collisions with the ZEUS detector at DESY in Hamhurg, Germany, which is now producing data. With an available center of mass energy of 315 GeV, this group will be able to probe the structure of the proton to length scales as small as 10e-18 cm.

The Durkin-Ling group is also involved in the CMS collaboration to construct and operate a major detector system at the LHC. The LHC will provide proton-proton collisions at center of mass energy of 14 TeV at an unprecedented luminosity of l0e34 cm^2s^-1. The aim is to search for the Higgs boson, a key prediction of the Standard Model of high energy physics, and to look for new physics beyond the standard model.

Professors Hughes and Winer are exploring the high energy frontier of particle physics. They are part of the CDF collaboration which has constructed and operated a detector at the Eermi National Accelerator Laboratory's levatron Collider. The Tevatron collides protons and antiprotons with a center-of-mass energy near 2 TeV. A collision at this high center-of-mass energy can create very massive particles such as the top quark. Winer and Hughes have taken a leading role in the discovery of the top quark and the studies of its properties. In addition, this group is developing state-of-the-art trigger electronics for the CDE-II experiment. The upgraded CDF detector will provide an excellent tool for a detailed study of the top quark and study of the Standard Model of particle physics at the world's highest energy.

The usual mode of operation in high energy phvsics is to collaborate with other institutions, with each institution assuming responsibility for a different portion of the apparatus. This means that equipment is built and tested at Ohio State and then transported to the accelerator and installed. After the data has been taken, participating institutions analyze it, usually by using local computer facilities.

Our on-campus facilities for high energy experimental physics are outstanding. Numerous rooms comprising thousands of square feet of floor space are dedicated to construction. There is a world-class electronics shop with seven full-time members who are expert at digital and analog electronics. There is also a well-equipped departmental machine shop with seven machinists and a supervised student shop.

Computer facilities are also excellent with a central departmental VMS VAX cluster, access to an off-campus Cray YMP/864, and two DEC Unix work station farms owned by the high energy physics groups. These farms consist of more than 50 workstations, and their computing power exceeds that of modern campuswide computer systems.