As physicists worldwide celebrated the June publication of the 1,000th paper of the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), four Catholic University scientists shared in the virtual celebration.
University Provost Aaron Dominguez and Assistant Research Professor Rachel Bartek have been authors on all 1,000 papers. Physics graduate students Andrés Vargas and Rishabh Uniyal also served as authors on the 1,000th paper.
The CMS Collaboration brings together particle physicists, engineers, computer scientists, technicians and students from across the globe to study the very basic laws of the universe. The collaboration operates and collects data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, one of the general-purpose particle detectors at the LHC. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the international CMS and ATLAS collaborations is the most famous achievement to date at the facility, earning the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.
Churning out raw data from a cavern located 100 meters below the French countryside, the CMS detector has produced enough information for its associated researchers to typically publish more than 100 research papers per year. CMS scientists have been producing, testing, and publishing insights arising from the spectacular particle collisions at the LHC for more than a decade.
“Being part of an international collaboration like CMS has been very rewarding as we strive to describe fundamental physics,” Bartek says. “It’s hard to believe we have already published 1,000 physics papers, and that speaks to the hard work and dedication of every member of CMS.”
Dominguez and Bartek also recently received the first installment of $375,000 from a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to build the next generation of particle detectors for CMS. The work will be done in Catholic University’s physics lab in Hannan Hall, with three graduate students working as part of the group.
“I feel so fortunate to be at a great Catholic research university like CatholicU, where these kinds of fundamental discoveries of God’s creation can be made,” says Dominguez.