High Energy Physics Faculty Awarded $3.84M DOE Grant
By Theresa Gabrielli
The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded seven CMU Department of Physics faculty a $3.84M grant to study high-energy physics (HEP), a wide-reaching field of study that investigates the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions in what is known as the standard model of particle physics. This research encompasses everything from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest cosmological scales.
"The goal of all our research is to understand not only the elementary constituents of matter and how they function, but also how they relate to the energy-matter content of the universe," said Professor Manfred Paulini, MCS associate dean for faculty and graduate affairs and principal investigator for the grant.
The recipients include faculty from both experimental and theoretical physics research backgrounds, who each specialize in unique fields of study. Paulini himself searches for new particles with the potential to be candidates for dark matter that are not predicted by the standard model. Assistant Professor John Alison studies the Higgs boson, a recently-confirmed particle which is essential to explaining why elementary particles have mass. Professor Roy Briere explores the properties of particles containing heavy charm and beauty quarks, also known as “heavy flavor physics.” Professors Rachel Mandelbaum and Scott Dodelson, head of the Department of Physics, are cosmologists investigating dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion of the universe. Assistant Professor Diana Parno is involved in the COHERENT collaboration, which studies the properties of elusive neutrino particles. Professor Ira Rothstein does phenomenological work developing effective field theories to further our understanding of the standard model.
“The grant supports two of the Department’s scientific thrusts: subatomic physics and cosmology,” said Dodelson. “The large increase from the last cycle – especially in this era of tight agency budgets – is an indication that CMU is growing in these areas, and I am particularly pleased that two of our recent hires, Diana Parno and John Alison, are funded to carry out their important work.”
Parno’s scientific pursuits involve understanding a type of neutrino scattering in which a neutrino interacts with an atomic nucleus that then gently bounces back. This phenomenon was first predicted 45 years ago, but was experimentally detected only three years ago. Parno’s research frequently takes her to Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) in Tennessee, where this scattering has now been detected in two different types of detectors.
“This type of neutrino scattering is exciting because it is unusually likely to happen,” said Parno. “We’ve actually built the smallest neutrino detectors in the world! In the future – at least a decade or two from now – this could open up possibilities for monitoring nuclear power plants, measuring their neutrino emissions to make sure that they are tuned for legitimate, civilian uses.”
CMU’s HEP research is carried out in multiple facilities around the world. In addition to ORNL, the faculty supported on this grant are involved at the Belle II detector in Japan, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, and the upcoming Rubin Observatory currently under construction in Chile.
“This is really an exciting time to be working at the LHC! We have already recorded a lot of high-quality data which can be used to study the Higgs boson,” said Alison. “[However], there are plans to increase the size of the dataset by more than an order of magnitude by increasing the intensity of the LHC beams starting around 2026. This funding gives us the ability to both prepare for the future and make the most of the data already collected.”
Public funding has been critical for particle research at CMU since the 1940s. After World War II, then-Carnegie Tech entered the emerging field of nuclear physics. A federal grant was given to establish a Nuclear Research Center facility in Saxonburg, PA, which included a synchrocyclotron particle accelerator that, at that time, was one of the two highest-energy accelerators in the world. Over a period of ten years this laboratory carried out extensive basic research into the properties of nuclear and subatomic particles. Since then, CMU has continuously received federal funding for HEP research.