College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) physicists at Syracuse University have launched a new tracking device to research the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. The device, known as the Upstream Tracker, was installed at the CERN laboratory on the Swiss-French border just outside of Geneva, which uses some of the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study fundamental particles.
The Upstream Tracker is part of an ambitious upgrade to the "Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb)" experiment taking data at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which aims to uncover information about the universe through science known as new physics. New physics is knowledge that enhances the current understanding of how the universe works. The university's High-Energy Physics group working at LHCb led an international team of collaborators that designed and constructed this detector.
The installation is the culmination of a decade of research and work, led by physics professor Marina Artuso. The project received nearly $7 million in awards from the National Science Foundation, with a majority of the funds going directly to Syracuse research.
The Upstream Tracker will help scientists search for knowledge beyond the "Standard Model" of physics, which is the current best theory about the building blocks of the universe. The Upstream Tracker is a crucial component of the LHCb tracking system, used to reconstruct the positions of the subatomic particles produced in the proton-proton collisions, and is part of a high-speed processor that implements sophisticated algorithms to make real-time decisions about what to record. It's technology that will empower physicists to make key discoveries about fundamental particles.
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