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. Mankind has asked
certain questions for as long as anyone
can recall.
Questions of life, death, existence,
and the very nature of the universe
itself. While not all such questions have
been answered,
there are some for which science has
made tremendous progress.
For instance, we now know that the
universe began about 14 billion years
ago
in an unimaginable explosion called The
Big Bang.
The universe has been expanding and
cooling since then,
leading to the familiar world in which
we live. Another question about which
we've learned a lot over the past few
hundred years
is the ultimate nature of matter itself.
Abandoning the now discredited
elements of earth, water, air, and fire,
we are now certain that matter is made
up of atoms.
Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and
electrons,
and the last thirty years has taught us
that even the protons and neutrons are
made of smaller building blocks called
quirks.
When you combine these building blocks
with four known forces
we can describe everything in our
universe. These forces are gravity,
electromagnetism, and the strong and weak
nuclear forces.
However, not all mysteries have been solved.
We have discovered a substance called
antimatter
that is the opposite of ordinary matter.
The problem is that we see a lot less 
of it
than we expect. We don't know why.
Further, it is quite possible that quirks
and leptons are not the smallest
building blocks of the cosmos,
and it's equally possible that there are
other forces still to be found.
Until recently, scientists could only
speculate on the origins of mass,
and it was only in the summer of 2012
that it seemed that we might have
finally
answered that question with the
discovery of a particle called
the Higgs Boson. The laboratory at which
many of these important questions might
be answered
is this 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,
or LHC. One of the biggest and more
complex
is called the Compact Muon Solenoid, or
CMS.
The CMS detector is enormous. It is 50
feet high,
fifty feet wide, and seventy feet long,
and it weighs over 14,000 tons.
The best way to describe it is as a
huge
100 megapixel camera able to take 40
million pictures a second.
The detector is so large that it takes
over 3,000 physicists
to operated and analyze the data it
records.
The pictures this detector takes are of
collisions between pairs of protons
traveling at nearly the speed of light,
recreating the conditions that were
common
when the universe began. Using this
constant barrage
of collisions, scientists collect data that
allow them to better understand the laws
that govern the universe
and to get closer to finding answers to
timeless questions.
The CERN laboratory is a vibrant
international research facility,
drawing physicists from around the globe.
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.
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 the
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. 
Once at CERN, scientists consult with
colleagues from around the world.
Scientific results are critically
evaluated in large meetings
and in small groups. Sometimes the most
crucial conversations occur
one-on-one in the coffee shop in
building 40, which houses offices for
physicists working on the LHC.
Visiting CERN is scientifically
intense,
but there are also opportunities to
relax, from games of frisbee on the lawn
to hiking and skiing opportunities in
the nearby Alps.
Strolls along the scenic Lake Lemond
and Rhone River in downtown Geneva are
added benefits,
but for all the amenities of Switzerland the thing that brings
US physicists to CERN is the science. 
If you ask a physicist why they're there
a common theme emerges.
I work at the LHC because it is 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
up science and technology, and there's no
place 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.
 
