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SMU physicists celebrate Nobel Prize for discovery of Higgs boson “god particle”

SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. DOE labs — that participate in discovery experiments

SMU’s experimental physics group played a pivotal role in discovering the Higgs boson — the particle that proves the theory for which two scientists have received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the Nobel Prize to theorists Peter W. Higgs and François Englert to recognize their work developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles mass. U.S. scientists played a significant role in advancing the theory and in discovering the particle that proves the existence of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson.

The Nobel citation recognizes Higgs and Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

In the 1960s, Higgs and Englert, along with other theorists, including Robert Brout, Tom Kibble and Americans Carl Hagen and Gerald Guralnik, published papers introducing key concepts in the theory of the Higgs field. In 2012, scientists on the international ATLAS and CMS experiments, performed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Europe, confirmed this theory when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

“A scientist may test out a thousand different ideas over the course of a career. If you’re fortunate, you get to experiment with one that works,” says SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson. As the leader of an SMU Department of Physics team working on the experiment, Stroynowski served as U.S. coordinator for the ATLAS Experiment’s Liquid Argon Calorimeter, which measures energy from the particles created by proton collisions.

The University’s experimental physics group has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

SMU joins nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions — including 89 U.S. universities and seven U.S. Department of Energy laboratories — that participate in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, making up about 23 percent of the ATLAS collaboration and 33 percent of CMS at the time of the Higgs discovery. Brookhaven National Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the ATLAS experiment, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for the CMS experiment. U.S. scientists provided a significant portion of the intellectual leadership on Higgs analysis teams for both experiments.

Preliminary discovery results were announced July 4, 2012 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia.

“It is an honor that the Nobel Committee recognizes these theorists for their role in predicting what is one of the biggest discoveries in particle physics in the last few decades,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “I congratulate the whole particle physics community for this achievement.”

The majority of U.S. scientists participating in LHC experiments work primarily from their home institutions, remotely accessing and analyzing data through high-capacity networks and grid computing. The United States plays an important role in this distributed computing system, providing 23 percent of the computing power for ATLAS and 40 percent for CMS. The United States also supplied or played a leading role in several main components of the two detectors and the LHC accelerator, amounting to a value of $164 million for the ATLAS detector, $167 million for the CMS detector, and $200 million for the LHC. Support for the U.S. effort comes from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

“It’s wonderful to see a 50-year-old theory confirmed after decades of hard work and remarkable ingenuity,” said Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs. “The U.S. has played a key role, contributing scientific and technical expertise along with essential computing and data analysis capabilities — all of which were necessary to bring the Higgs out of hiding. It’s a privilege to share in the success of an experiment that has changed the face of science.”

The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN was the culmination of decades of effort by physicists and engineers around the world, at the LHC but also at other accelerators such as the Tevatron accelerator, located at Fermilab, and the Large Electron Positron accelerator, which once inhabited the tunnel where the LHC resides. Work by scientists at the Tevatron and LEP developed search techniques and eliminated a significant fraction of the space in which the Higgs boson could hide.

Several contributors from SMU have made their mark on the project at various stages, including current Department of Physics faculty members Ryszard Stroynowski, Jingbo Ye, Robert Kehoe and Stephen Sekula. Faculty members Pavel Nadolsky and Fred Olness performed theoretical calculations used in various aspects of data analysis.

University postdoctoral fellows on the ATLAS Experiment have included Julia Hoffmann, David Joffe, Ana Firan, Haleh Hadavand, Peter Renkel, Aidan Randle-Conde and Daniel Goldin.

SMU has awarded eight Ph.D. and seven M.Sc. degrees to students who performed advanced work on ATLAS, including Ryan Rios, Rozmin Daya, Renat Ishmukhametov, Tingting Cao, Kamile Dindar, Pavel Zarzhitsky and Azzedin Kasmi.

Significant contributions to ATLAS have also been made by SMU faculty members in the Department of Physics’ Optoelectronics Lab, including Tiankuan Liu, Annie Xiang and Datao Gong.

“The discovery of the Higgs is a great achievement, confirming an idea that will require rewriting of the textbooks,” Stroynowski says. “But there is much more to be learned from the LHC and from ATLAS data in the next few years. We look forward to continuing this work.”

Higgs and Englert published their papers independently and did not meet in person until the July 4, 2012, announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. Higgs, 84, is a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Englert, 80, is a professor emeritus at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

The prize was announced at 5:45 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013.

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Dallas Observer: How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle

The Dallas Observer interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about Texas’ historic role in particle physics before the landmark discovery announced in July of the new fundamental “God particle” necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The Dallas Observer article, “How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle,” published Aug. 15.

The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Brantley Hargrove
Dallas Observer

Ryszard Stroynowski sat bathed in the pale glow of his laptop screen. At 2 in the morning of Independence Day, as the final, fugitive firecracker reports of the night crackled across a sleeping Dallas, the 65-year-old physicist was wide awake. As he watched the live broadcast in his pajamas, his colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, the locus of the physics universe, tolled the end of the search for an elusive force that had confounded them for half a century. It was the final puzzle piece in a theory that describes with unfathomable precision the fundamental particles of the universe and the laws they obey.

This piece, known as the Higgs boson and often referred to in the popular press as “the God particle,” was detected in the largest scientific experiment ever devised. Inside a racetrack-shaped particle accelerator five miles across and spanning the borders of France and Switzerland, researchers had reproduced the first, violent moments of creation. By crossing opposing beams of protons powered by enough electrical current to flash-melt a ton of steel instantaneously, and guided by megalithic magnets ringing the accelerator’s course, researchers induced collisions powerful enough to overcome the elemental forces that bind the proton’s constituents. Out of the flashes of the collisions, they glimpsed the wraith-like field that allowed atoms and molecules, stars and planets, to coalesce out of chaos. What they found helped the shapeless take form.

“As a layman, I would now say I think we have it,” said a beaming Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, to the experimenters, the press and to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Stroynowski, an avuncular man with a smooth pate, a white corona of hair and pale gray eyes, already knew, had known for months. After all, he had crunched the numbers. He led the design and construction of the major component of a detector heavier than an aircraft carrier and as big as the science building at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches. It was called ATLAS, and it found the Higgs.

Stroynowski knew something else, too, a truth that had irrevocably altered his life, the lives of thousands of physicists and the future of North Texas, if not the state. Once upon a time, a tiny town known for its blackland prairie and cotton fields, just a straight shot south down Interstate 35 from Dallas, was physics’ next frontier. In 1988, Ellis County was selected the winner in a heated nationwide competition to be the site for a particle accelerator that would dwarf the one in Geneva. In size, the leviathan’s circumference would approach D.C.’s Beltway, some 54 miles around; big enough to envelop Waxahachie, and require the extinction of a nearby farming hamlet. The world’s existing accelerators had taken physics as far as they could. The accelerator in Texas, called the Superconducting Super Collider, had the potential to take it further than any theorist could possibly dream, opening doors they could not predict.

Thousands of physicists from all over the world, including Stroynowski, pulled up stakes and migrated to the North Texas site as though it were Mecca, a holy place where the future of the field lay. They established physics departments at nearby universities and began construction of the Super Collider and the components they had to literally invent as they went along. But in 1993, after more than a decade of work and $2 billion spent, Congress canceled it. Its death rendered stillborn American hegemony in the physics world and drove a host of promising young minds from the field. [ … ]

Read the full article.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter, http://twitter.com/smuresearch.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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NatGeo: “God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters

National Geographic News science reporter Ker Than interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The National Geographic article, ““God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters,” published July 4.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Ker Than
National Geographic
“I think we have it. You agree?”

Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva, CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle—or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.

The long-sought particle may complete the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in our universe have mass—and in so doing, why galaxies, planets, and even humans have any right to exist.

“We have a discovery,” Heuer said at the seminar. “We have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson.”

At the meeting were four theorists who helped develop the Higgs theory in the 1960s, including Peter Higgs himself, who could be seen wiping away tears as the announcement was made.

Although preliminary, the results show a so-called five-sigma of significance, which means that there is only a one in a million chance that the Higgs-like signal the teams observed is a statistical fluke.

“It’s a tremendous and exciting time,” said physicist Michael Tuts, who works with the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Experiment, one of the two Higgs-seeking LHC projects.

The Columbia University physicist had organized a wee-hours gathering of physicists and students in the U.S. to watch the announcement, which took place at 9 a.m., Geneva time.

“This is the payoff. This is what you do it for.”

The two LHC teams searching for the Higgs—the other being the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) project—did so independently. Neither one knew what the other would present this morning.

“It was interesting that the competing experiment essentially had the same result,” said physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, an ATLAS team member based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It provides additional confirmation.”

CERN head Heuer called today’s announcement a “historic milestone” but cautioned that much work lies ahead as physicists attempt to confirm the newfound particle’s identity and further probe its properties.

Read the full article.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Categories
Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

DMN: Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle”

The Dallas Morning News interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The Morning News article, “Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle,” published July 4.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Joe Simnacher
Staff Writer

Three teams of physicists from North Texas were at the heart of the research that discovered the new subatomic particle announced Wednesday.

Professors and graduate students from Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington were all working in Geneva on Wednesday when the identification of the basic building block of the universe was announced.

“It’s really exciting,” said Dr. Joe Izen, the physics professor leading the UTD team. “I get paid to do this.”

The North Texas teams were part of ATLAS, one of seven larger experiments designed to detect the subatomic particle.

The UTD team created and operated the ATLAS pixel detector, “kind of like an 80 million pixel camera, if you will,” Izen said. It detects the paths of charge tracks so they can be traced to their point of origin.

The SMU team works on the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter, which measures the energy of photons and electrons.

Dr. Ryszard Stroynowski, physics professor and leader of the SMU team, said he and his colleagues have spent years in Geneva working with equipment they built in Dallas. Stroynowski recently devoted a one-year sabbatical from SMU to the experiment.

“The experiment operates 24 hours a day,” Stroynowski said. “It has to be manned in shifts.”

Read the full article.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter, http://twitter.com/smuresearch.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Categories
Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

CBS Channel 11: Long-fought discovery of elusive “God” particle brings joy to SMU physicists

CBS DFW Channel 11 reporter Jack Fink with KTVT-TV interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smuresearch.com.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.