Engineering and the Higgs Boson

Prof Roger Rusack –
University of Minnesota – School of Physics and Astronomy

Abstract
On July 4th 2012, two independent groups working at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  announced the discovery a new particle, the Higgs boson. The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever constructed and the detectors built by the groups to detect new phenomena produced in the ultra-high energy collisions in the LHC are among the most complex systems ever constructed.   Building and running a 27 km long circular string of superconducting magnets at 1.8K, or selecting in real time from the 40 million collisions per second the 100 to keep, or distributing petabytes of data to 170  computing centers scattered In 40 different countries, are examples of the type of engineering problems that had to be solved to detect the Higgs Boson. In my talk I will pick a few problems and discuss how we solved them.

Bio
Since his graduate school days at Imperial College in the UK in the mid-seventies Professor Rusack has been designing, building and operating experiments to measure new phenomena at the highest attainable interaction energies.  He has worked at both the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) and at CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics. He has conducted experiments at these laboratories to map out the Standard Model of particle physics, including experiments that provided early evidence for quark jets and for gluons, that made the first direct observation of tau-neutrino interactions and the CMS experiment, one of the two that observed the Higgs boson.  He has been a member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota since 1993.