 
Understanding our universe and the laws
that govern it allows us to shape the
world in which we live.
Faculty in the Physics Department at the
University of Notre Dame
are making significant progress in
pushing back the frontiers of knowledge,
including the recent discovery of the
Higgs Boson. This discovery led to the
2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for Francois
Englert
and Peter Higgs, for correctly predicting
the particle's existence,
but the story of the impact of American
researchers
doesn't end there. Scientists continue to
do research at the CERN laboratory
in Geneva, Switzerland. There are several
detectors
weighing many thousands of tons which
are arrayed around a huge particle
accelerator called the Large Hadron
Collider
for LHC. One of the biggest and more
complex
is called the Compact Muon Solenoid or
CMS. 
The single largest national group of
scientists that work
on the CMS detector are faculty, staff
members, and graduate students from
American universities and laboratories,
and they have designed important and
technologically challenging portions of
the detector.
The University of Notre Dame has a major
involvement in the LHC with over two
dozen researchers, including faculty,
students, and staff.
We help build the detectors that 
measure the energy
of the collisions, and we used those
detectors
to discover the Higgs Boson. We're
particularly proud of contributions
of our student to this discovery
and also of our national outreach program,
which connects students,
high school students, and teachers from
throughout the United States to this 
research.
And we're not resting. We're now working on
the design of the detectors that will carry this
program through to 2035.
Significant technical work was performed
inside the US,
although eventually all the components
and many of the researchers traveled
to CERN.
If you ask a physicist why they're there,
a common theme emerges. I work at the LHC
because it is the the world's
largest and most energetic accelerator,
and this allows us to study
some really interesting physics at CMS.
Working at the LHC I get to be at the
forefront
of Science and Technology, and there's no
place that I'd rather be.
I do research at the LHC because I would like to be a part
of the next big discoveries in particle physics, because
I think they will happen here. Over the
next decade,
the LHC and the CMS experiment will
be probing the very frontier of knowledge.
While the observation of the Higgs Boson
was the first discovery that will go into
the textbooks,
it certainly won't be the last. CMS
is an international collaboration, filled
with world-class caliber minds,
and researchers from the University of
Notre Dame will continue to play crucial
roles.
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