Scientists gather to plan particle physics project

Some 100 scientists from research institutions around the United States will gather at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln April 7 and 8 for the annual meeting of collaborators on the U.S. part of the Compact Muon Solenoid project.

The CMS project will be conducted at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, under construction at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. Scheduled to begin in 2007, the experiment will explore the frontiers of energy, matter, space and time.

"We're getting close to the time when the Large Hadron Collider will be built, so we will spend time talking about the kind of physical measurements we will be taking and how best to use our detector," said Kenneth Bloom, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UNL and a member of the U.S. collaboration. "We will also discuss how we're going to function when we start taking data."

Bloom is one of four UNL physicists who are closely involved in the CMS project, along with Greg Snow, Dan Claes and Aaron Dominguez.

The CMS project will create so much data that it will take dozens of supercomputers crunching 24/7 for years to analyze all the information. To better handle the flow, data collected at CERN will be parceled out to computing facilities around the world in a hierarchical grid, including those known as Tier-2 sites. UNL's Research Computing Facility is one of seven Tier-2 sites in the United States. An April 6 workshop at the UNL facility will involve computer scientists and engineers working at the Tier-2 sites.

The CMS collaboration meeting will be at the Nebraska Champions Club, 707 Stadium Drive.

CONTACT: Kenneth Bloom, Asst. Professor, Physics & Astronomy, (402) 472-6093