Shouxiang Wu
Technical Staff
(Electrical Engineer)
Office: Physics Research Building, Room 467
Phone: 617-353-5102
Email: wusx@bu.edu
Research Descriptions:
The Compact Muon Solenoid
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a 15 kiloton detector designed to search for new physics at an unprecedented distance scale of 10-19 m at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CMS experiment will probe such tiny distance scales with proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV with first collisions expected in 2007. The detector consists of 220 square meters of silicon pixels and strips (80 million channels) for precision charged particle tracking, 75k lead-tungsten crystals for precision electron and photon measurement, a highly segmentated1000-ton brass hadron-calorimeter plus a quartz-fiber forward calorimeter to measure jets from quark and gluon scattering and energy balance, all surrounded by a precision muon chambers embedded in the return yoke of the magnet.
The GHz collision rate at the LHC presents enormous technical challenges on the design of readout electronics due to the intense radiation environment and the high speed at which millions of channels of data must be processed. The Boston University group, which includes not only our excellent staff in the Electronics Design Facility but also several experts resident at CERN, has a leadership role in calorimeter electronics and software for physics analysis of jets and missing energy. The group has designed and built the data concentrator, a sophisticated piece of digital electronics based on modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to read out the hadron calorimeter. Arjan Heering has led the custom design of the 18-channel hybrid photo-diode used to convert scintillation light from the calorimeter into electrical signals. We have also designed the electronics to feed calorimeter signals into the muon trigger to greatly reduce the backgrounds in the online event selection.
The Boston University group is also taking a leadership role in physics analysis of jets and missing energy. This work is closely tied to a number of dedicated runs in the test beam at CERN (coordinated by D. Lazic). While the exact physics to appear at the LHC is unknown, we have a strong belief that it will involve measurement of muons and quark jets. The timing of the CMS project presents an opportunity for new graduate students not seen since the discovery of the W and Z at CERN nearly 25 years ago.
