Faculty Member Earns $465,000 Grant for High Energy Physics Research

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Marc Baarmand, Florida Tech professor of physics and space sciences, has received a $465,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to continue his research in elementary particle physics and understanding the origin of mass. This grant is in addition to more than $1,100,000 that the DOE has previously funded Baarmand for his work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) project, which is located at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

After more than a decade of construction and commissioning the CMS experiment will start data taking later this fall when the Large Hadron Collider, a proton accelerator, starts its operation producing proton-proton collisions at the highest ever energies. Baarmand, research scientist Igor Vodopiyanov and graduate students Hamit Mermerkaya and Mike Ralich are preparing for data analysis.

The CMS experiment, an array of large particle detectors, is the size of a five-story building. The experiment will record data on proton collisions occurring every 25 nanoseconds in the Large Hadron Collider accelerator tunnel 300 feet beneath the earth. (April 10, 2009)