UofL High Energy Physics Group’s Research Intersections with the Physics Nobel Prize Announcements: Present and Past
Professors David N. Brown and Christopher L. Davis of the Department of Physics and Astronomy have led the UofL HEP group in work on the BaBar experiment since the 1990s. More than 60 undergraduate or high school students and 15 graduate students have been members of the group over the years, most contributing to the effort on the BaBar experiment. The 2008 Nobel prize citation’s inclusion of BaBar gave the group its first Nobel connection.
As principal investigator for the group, Brown was invited in 2009 to join the ATLAS experiment, utilizing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe’s main nuclear physics laboratory, CERN, located in Geneva. Brown was a visiting scientist on the experiment from 2009 through 2012 and involved several undergraduates and aPh.D. student in his studies.
With the announcement on October 8 of the 2013 Physics prize award to Francois Engelert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider,” the group has made its second Nobel connection!
More information on the BaBar Experiment and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics can be found at:
http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/Nobel2008.htm
More information on the ATLAS Experiment and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics can be found at:
http://atlas.ch/