For million-dollar components that travel thousands of miles to become part of a particle detector, the most perilous part of the trip might be airport security.
In 1985, ten years before scientists at Fermilab discovered the top quark, Scott Willenbrock was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is one of the two general purpose particle detectors being constructed at CERNs Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva, Switzerland.
How do you renovate a delicate, irreplaceable detector? Very carefully. During the last four months of 2006, the BaBar collaboration at SLAC successfully replaced a prematurely aging muon identification system.
I have been attending hundreds of talks by particle physicists who look for a very specific experimental signature that is predicted by a very specific theory extending the Standard Model.