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These are some of the projects that members of the High Energy Physics Group participate in. Theorectical PhysicsSee the Theoretical Physics Home Page for more information on the study of theoretical physics at the University of Victoria. The ATLAS Experiment at CERN
The ATLAS experiment will explore the high energy frontier at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. First collisions are expected in 2009. There are good reasons to believe that some new phenomena must exist over the energy range (up to 14 TeV) that will be accessible. ATLAS is one of the highest priority projects for particle physics in Canada, and the UVic group has been involved from the beginning. Hardware for the experiment is being built at UVic, and the group is also active in testing prototypes at CERN and writing the associated software. More information. The BaBar Experiment at SLAC
The BaBar experiment has been collecting data since 1999 at the PEP-II asymmetric e+e- collider at SLAC. The goal of the experiment is to study the breakdown of CP symmetry (the symmetry that relates matter to anti-matter) in the decays of B mesons (particles containing the b quark). CP violation had only been observed in one system (K mesons) before BaBar showed that it is also violated in B decays. The experiment is providing precision tests of our understanding of CP violation, and is sensitive to the presence of new phenomena at much higher energy scales through the study of rare decays. More information. The Linear Collider ExperimentResearch dealing with the 500 GeV e+e- Linear Collider. Seen as an important counterpart to LHC, the Linear Collider will help in understanding the Higgs boson as well as hopefully making discoveries beyond the standard model. More information. The UVic GRID TestbedWe are involved in a nation-wide effort to build a Grid, a 'network within the internet' that would bring diverse resources together and be made available to researchers who wouldn't have access to those resources normally. For example, a physicist located in California could use the Grid to run an experiment at CERN, store the data in a data farm at Princeton and then analyze it on a supercomputer located in Berkeley... all without leaving his computer. More information. The SNAP Dark Energy Space Telescope, and STARCaL Tunable Laser
Facilities at UVicOur laboratory in the Elliott building was used for the construction ofthe cryogenic feedthroughs for the ATLAS experiment and is being used for R&D on an advanced detector readout system for a Time Projection Chamberfor a future Linear Collider. We also have access to the excellent infrastructure available at the TRIUMF laboratory. We perform data analysis in Victoria using a 50 cpu beowulf linux cluster with 7 TB of disk, and using the IBM Linux Blade Cluster in the UVic computing center. ThesesThe theses of former students can be found here. PublicationsPeople from the UVic group have been principal authors on numerous publications. |
SNAP is a proposed space telescope to measure the properies of the mysterious "dark energy" that appears to be causing the Universe to not just expand, but accelerate its expansion. This dark energy was only recently discovered (in the late 1990s). Since then, dark energy has been verified by many different types of observations, and it potentially has implications for general relativity, and perhaps even quantum gravity. 
STARCaL