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 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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