Professor Lawrence R. Sulak
Chairman, Physics Department
590 Commonwealth Avenue
SCI-Room 255
 
Research Links
 
 
 
The CMS Project: We propose to build a general purpose detector designed to run at the highest luminosity at theLHC. The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector has been optimized or the search of the SM Higgs boson over a mass range from 90 GeV to 1 TeV, but it also allows detection of a wide range of possible signatures from alternative electro-weak symmetry breaking mechanisms. CMS is also well adapted for the study of top, beauty and tau physics at lower luminosities and will cover several important aspects of the heavy ion physics programme. We have chosen to identify and measure muons, photons and electrons with high precision. The energy resolution for the above particles will be better than 1% at 100 GeV. At the core of the CMS detector sits a large superconducting solenoid generating a uniform magnetic field of 4 T. The choice of a strong magnetic field leads to a compact design for the muon spectrometer without compromising the momentum resolution up to rapidities of 2.5. The inner tracking system will measure all high pt charged tracks with a momentum precision of Delta(p)/p ~ 0.1 pt (pt in TeV) in the range |eta| < 2.5. A high resolution chrystal electromagnetic calorimeter, designed to detect the two photon decay of an intermediate mass Higgs, is located inside the coil. Hermetic hadronic calorimeters surround the intersection region up to |eta| = 4.7 allowing tagging of forward jets and measurement of missing transverse energy.  
 

 

The CMS Project
 
 

The SuperK Project 

 
 		 The SuperK Project:  Super-Kamiokande is a 50,000 ton water Cherenkov detector that will begin data taking in April 1996. It supersedes previous detectors (IMB and Kamiokande) both in size and resolution. Large volume water detectors were invented to discover proton decay, but so far  ave only set limits (well in excess of the first predictions of the SU(5) Grand Unified Theory). As Super-K is 6-10 times larger than the previous generation of detectors, it can reach a proton lifetime of 10^34 years, reaching predictions by supersymmetric models (which are themselves supported by the apparent convergence of running coupling constants as measured at LEP and elsewhere). Among the possible decay modes are very interesting signatures, such as p -> neutrino K+ which would provide evidence for mediation by the Higgs particle. Since Super-K is well designed to investigate contained events of energy 1 GeV, it will naturally pursue the triguing puzzle of atmospheric neutrinos first observed in the prior generation of water  Cherenkov detectors. These neutrinos are produced in the shower of particles caused by cosmic ray interactions in our atmosphere; the puzzle is that the ratio of the flux of electron neutrinos to muon neutrinos disagrees with our best understanding of the underlying processes.
 
The MACRO Project: The deep underground MACRO detector is currently operating at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Abruzzo, Italy. MACRO has a geometrical acceptance of nearly 10000 m^2 at an average depth of 3.8 kilometers of water equivalent under the mountainous overburden of the Gran Sasso d'Italia. We use this large area detector to research several topics. The specialty of MACRO is the search for magnetic monopoles: particles with bare north or south magnetic charge. These particles are a natural consequence of Grand Unified Theories, which also predict that the monopole will be very massive: perhaps 10^16 GeV. Such particles can only be produced by the intense energies available during the big bang.   
The Macro Project in Abruzzo, Italy
 
 
 
The g-2 Project
 The g-2 Project: Our group's current research involves a new measurement,  at the level of 0.35 parts per million, of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. At Boston University, our group developed the front-end  electronics for reading out the photomultiplier signals, a system which  must be time stable at the level of 20 ps. We took our first data in the spring of 1997 and expect to collect much more in the summer of 1998. Our group also leads the offline software effort. A first result is expected in the spring of 1998. 
 
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