FERMILAB update..

Contact: Andre Salles, Fermilab Office of Communication, 630-840-6733, media@fnal.gov

Hello,

Earlier today, CERN announced the upcoming restart of the Large Hadron Collider after a two-year period of upgrades. I’m writing to share with you some information about the U.S. role in the LHC and experts you might want to interview.

The LHC will resume circulating beams of particles later this month. In the following months, the LHC experiments will begin collecting data, and scientists will begin looking for new discoveries: supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and particles we have never seen before.

U.S. scientists and institutions are a big part of that effort. About 1,700 scientists in the United States are involved in the LHC, covering all aspects of the work and research being done at CERN.  

The United States handles about 34 percent of the worldwide computing capacity for the ATLAS experiment, and about 35 percent for the CMS experiment.

Fermilab serves as the U.S. hub for the CMS experiment, one of two (along with ATLAS) that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. The laboratory hosts a remote operations center that U.S. scientists use to monitor the data-taking at the CMS experiment. Fermilab also hosts one of the top LHC computing centers in the world.

If you are interested in learning more about the scientific goals of the LHC and the U.S. and Fermilab contributions to that effort, here are some experts you can contact:

• Joe Lykken, Fermilab’s deputy director – can talk about the science of the LHC, including the Higgs boson
  lykken@fnal.gov, 630-840-4689
• Patty McBride, Fermilab senior scientist – can talk about the science of the CMS experiment
  mcbride@fnal.gov, 630-840-8071
• Marcela Carena, Fermilab theorist – can talk about particle theory, including Higgs particles and supersymmetry
  carena@fnal.gov, 630-840-4593
• Jim Hirschauer, Fermilab research associate – can talk about the CMS detector
  jhirsch@fnal.gov, 630-840-8346
• Lothar Bauerdick, US CMS operations program manager – can talk about computing and data analysis for LHC experiments
  bauerdick@fnal.gov, 630-840-6804

More on the U.S. role in the LHC: http://uslhc.web.cern.ch. More on Fermilab’s role in the LHC: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/particle-physics/experiments/lhc.html.