California State University, Fresno has joined a prestigious collaboration of top physicists, giving the Department of Physics’ students, faculty and staff access to the most up-to-date information possible on new frontiers in the science for the next 15 years or longer.

The program is the ATLAS (an acronym for A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) Experiment, which makes use of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. (CERN also gave birth to the World Wide Web.)

Fresno State is the only one of the 23 California State University system schools participating in the LHC program and CERN. That gives Fresno State physics faculty, students and staff opportunities unique in the CSU to work with what scientists believe will be the driving force behind high-energy physics for the foreseeable future. Five Fresno State physics students already are taking advantage of the connection.

The $8 billion LHC, which goes online in 2008, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. It accelerates protons to the speed of light and forces head-on collisions, whose energy is so high that particles, which existed only at the very beginning of the universe, could be reproduced.

“Scientist’s expectations for discoveries at the LHC include the Higgs (nicknamed the “God particle” by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman), which is responsible for the origin of mass, supersymmetric particles and many other new physics scenarios, including extra dimensions,” said Dr. Yongsheng Gao, an assistant professor of physics at Fresno State. Gao has been involved in the ATLAS Experiment for the past five years.

Gao received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at Shandong University in China and a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison before doing postdoctoral work at Harvard. He taught at Southern Methodist University before joining the Fresno State faculty. He has published more than 400 papers.

He has been involved with the ATLAS Experiment since 2002.

Joining Gao on Fresno State’s ATLAS team is Dr. Ray Hall, an associate professor of physics, whose research from Fresno State has helped the university become an official collaborator at the Fermi National Laboratory.

Hall received his bachelor’s degree from Fresno State and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Riverside. He did his postdoctoral research at the University of California at Irvine. He has been member of the College of Science and Mathematics since 1999.

A third Fresno State team member will be recruited soon, Gao said – a postdoctoral researcher, who will spend significant time at CERN representing the university.

The ATLAS collaboration includes about 2,000 physicists from more than 160 institutions in 35 countries. Fresno State’s Gao and Hall are among about 400 physicists participating from about 40 American universities (including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, the University of Chicago and University of California) and national laboratories (such as Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne).

Fresno State now is a collaborate institute of CERN and joined ATLAS through affiliation with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The Fresno State faculty, staff and students on ATLAS now have free access to ATLAS data and the huge grid computing facilities at CERN, the national labs and research universities for their ATLAS research.

Qualified physics faculty/staff of ATLAS and Fresno State will be authors in all ATLAS publications in top physics journals, including all the papers of possible discoveries from ATLAS data.

“Member institutions commit to allowing those involved in ATLAS to spend about 20 percent of their time at CERN helping on the experiment by taking data and monitoring the ATLAS detector. Most of that time will be during summer breaks for faculty,” Gao said.

Dr. Gerardo Munoz, chair of the Department of Physics, said faculty members “made a great effort to accommodate schedules and budgets to be able to pursue this exciting collaboration.”

He also praised “the vision of former Dean K.P. Wong and Dean Karen Carey [of the College of Science and Mathematics]. Without their support we would have been unable to move forward.”

The U.S. Department of Energy/National Science Foundation finances the membership fee to CERN for faculty/staff to be on the ATLAS publication author list. Additional funding will be sought to support Fresno State’s ATLAS participation effort.

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