NSF Awards Funding to Build Upgrades for Large Hadron Collider

On April 1, 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Columbia University/Nevis Labs a $75M multi-year Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) grant to Professors Brooijmans, Parsons and Tuts (PI) to build and manage the construction of key components for the upgrade of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. (For more details click here).

The upgrades supported by this grant and others will be completed in 2025 and will allow the international ATLAS collaboration to address some of the outstanding questions in particle physics such as elucidating the properties of the Higgs boson, searching for dark matter and understanding what new surprises may lie beyond the standard model of particle physics.  It will allow students and postdocs the unique opportunity to participate in cutting edge detector development and construction.

The Nevis Labs team will design and build the liquid argon electronics upgrades and manage the subawards, for other detector upgrades, to the following collaborating institutions, the University of Arizona, Boston University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, New York University, Northern Illinois University, University of Oregon, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, Southern Methodist University, Stony Brook University, University of California–Irvine, University of Massachusetts–Amherst, University of Texas– Arlington, and University of Texas–Austin. These upgrades, together with upgrades supported by the DOE ($163M) and international collaborators, will enable the ATLAS experiment to open a new window on the understanding of our universe.

April 03, 2020