SBU Awarded NSF Funding for Multidisciplinary Project to Advance Technology

PI John Hobbs

As lead institution for the U.S. ATLAS collaboration, Stony Brook University has received additional National Science Foundation (NSF) funding toward the project. This recent $5.4M award for U.S. ATLAS Operations: Discovery and Measurement at the Energy Frontier will stimulate development of a scientific and technically educated workforce, advancing the multidisciplinary application of technology and the popularization and dissemination of science to the general public.

Stony Brook Physics Professor John Hobbs is principal investigator for U.S. NSF operations of ATLAS, which has received a total amount of over $54M in funding to date. This ongoing project provides the U.S. contribution to the international ATLAS experiment at the powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN in Switzerland.

This award to Stony Brook will cover the NSF-funded universities participating in the ATLAS experiment and support activities that provide opportunities to develop and maintain complex detector apparatus, custom analog and digital electronics, and software systems for data management, data processing, and technical analysis.

The operation of existing detector components, design of upgrade components, and related research activities create opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among personnel at Stony Brook and collaborating institutions as physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and computer scientists work with post-docs and students. Similarly, physics personnel will work closely with computing professionals at their home institutions and at national laboratories to support the various software and computing activities.

About U.S. ATLAS

ATLAS Experiment © 2015 CERN

U.S. ATLAS is the U.S. collaboration for the ATLAS experiment at the powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN in Switzerland. ATLAS, one of four detectors at the LHC, is designed to detect particles created by proton-proton collisions. ATLAS has already completed one of its main goals, the discovery of a particle called the Higgs boson, which gives mass to the elementary particle building blocks of matter.

U.S. ATLAS is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the NSF. Brookhaven National Laboratory is the host laboratory in the U.S. for the 47 U.S. institutions contributing to the project. In total, 178 laboratories and universities around the world are involved in building, operating and analyzing the data and upgrading parts of ATLAS.