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The experimental high energy physics program at Ohio State is strong and broad. There are eight faculty members in this research area, with 10 postdoctoral researchers, 12 PhD students, and a supporting staff of a dozen engineers and technicians. The faculty members are among the leaders of several national and international collaborations. Ohio State physicists play major roles in the design and construction of these experiments as well as leading crucial data analysis efforts. Funding comes primarily from the Department of Energy and totals more than a million dollars annually.
High energy physics research focuses on the fundamental particles and forces in the universe. These are the leptons, like the electron and muon, and the quarks from which the strongly interacting particles, such as the proton and neutron, are composed. Extremely high collision energies are required to get these particles close enough to study the interactions between them. Since particle accelerators and detectors are complex and expensive devices, these experiments are usually performed at national and international laboratories. Below are the on-going and future experiments which Ohio State physicists are involved in:
This on-going experiment is located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. Its main physics aims are to refine the understanding of the top quark (co-discovered by CDF in 1995) and to search for the Higgs boson, a key prediction of the Standard Model that will lead to fundamental understanding of the origin of mass.
ZEUS is an on-going experiment located at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. Its key physics goals are the precision measurement of the structure of the proton, the searches for quark and lepton substructures and the testings of the strong interaction theory QCD.
The BABAR Experiment is carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in Menlo Park, California. This experiment specializes in the detailed studies of the charm and bottom quarks as well as the tau lepton.
Currently under construction at CERN in Geneva,
Switzerland, the LHC will be the
highest energy collider in the world upon its completion in 2008.
The ATLAS and
CMS experiments provide
excellent opportunities to discover the Higgs boson. The new energy region opened
up by the LHC
could also yield unexpected discoveries, paving the way toward our understanding
of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
L. Stanley Durkin, Professor
Ph.D. Stanford University, 1981
K.K. Gan, Professor
Ph.D. Purdue University, 1985
Klaus Honscheid, Professor
Dr. rer. nat. University of Bonn, 1988
Richard E. Hughes, Professor
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1992
Harris P. Kagan, Professor
Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 1979
Richard Kass, Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Davis, 1978
T.Y. Ling, Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1971
Brian L. Winer, Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1991