The popular web site Softpedia has written about SMU's new "world's fastest integrated circuit" designed for use in the challenging environment of the Large Hadron Collider.
The circuit was designed by physicists in SMU's Department of Physics specifically for the Liquid Argon Calorimeter, an important ATLAS sub-detector.
Imagine a tiny integrated circuit so small it must be viewed through a microscope, but so powerful, fast and sturdy it can routinely transmit huge amounts of data at high speed in a highly radioactive environment, where temperatures might fall below an unimaginable 300 degrees F.
Yet despite those challenges, the circuit must dissipate very little heat and — because its location makes routine maintenance impossible — it must be highly reliable. An SMU team of physicists led by Jingbo Ye, an associate professor of physics, not only imagined it — they designed it.
Fredrick Olness, a professor in SMU's Physics Department, has been named the inaugural lecturer in a program launched by the DESY laboratory, Germany's premier research center for particle physics.
DESY's "Theorist of the Week" program will bring prominent theorists from around the globe to spend a week at the lab's analysis center in Hamburg, Germany. Olness, who will visit the laboratory in March, is the program's first guest physicist.
SMU is involved in new high-energy particle research by a team working with data from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to understand the Higgs boson.
After a huge success in first testing, followed by a very public meltdown last September, the Large Hadron Collider may be ready for action again as early as June.
But before the science can proceed, the world's scientists must come to terms with the complex organism they have created, says one project manager.
"We will have to understand the detector first," says Ryszard Stroynowski, chair and professor of physics at SMU.
"Antimatter" is one of the big stars in the new Ron Howard film "Angels & Demons." After seeing the movie, people may wonder how much of the science in the film is actually real.
SMU Physics Professor Fredrick Olness says the new action thriller exploits cutting-edge science to create an exciting tale of science fiction mystery and imagination. "Angels & Demons" takes key ideas that are based upon scientific fact, Olness comments, and then exaggerates the details for the purpose of storytelling — and that's the transformation from "science" to "science fiction."
At 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in April, a handful of SMU scientists continue working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, called by its acronym CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. A scattering of lights illuminates the windows in several buildings along the Rue Einstein, where researchers from dozens of countries and hundreds of institutions are combining their expertise on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the biggest physics experiment in history.
Ryszard Stroynowski, chair and professor of physics at SMU, points out each building in succession to a group of visitors. "By October, every light in every one of these windows will be on all night," he says.