ALICE & ATLAS
Forskningsinfrastrukturfinansiering VR ALICE & ATLAS 2023
Details
- Period: 2024-01-01 – 2028-12-31
- Type of funding: Infrastructure of national interest
Description
Infrastructure: The ALICE and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Project title: ALICE & ATLAS
Main applicant: Vice-Chancellor Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), project leader Jonas Strandberg, KTH. Local project leader at UU Elin Bergeås Kuutmann, division for High Energy Physics.
The project funds will be used for the operation and maintenance of the ALICE and ATLAS detectors, as well as for e-infrastructure to process and store data collected by the detectors. In addition to KTH and UU, Lund University (LU) and Stockholm University (SU) participate in the application. At UU, only ATLAS is represented.
The Standard Model for Elementary Particle Physics is at present our best description of the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions. In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, LHC, at CERN, discovered a new particle, the Higgs boson, which was the last missing piece in the Standard Model.
Despite the Standard Model now being complete, many unanswered questions remain, which usually count among the most important unanswered questions in modern physics: Are there new particles beyond the Standard Model? Why does the Higgs boson have the mass and other properties it has? What is the dark matter in the universe? What happened in the universe right after the Big Bang?
The Swedish research activities at the ALICE and ATLAS experiments at the LHC are trying to answer precisely these questions. In the Uppsala University ATLAS group, there is a research project with the aim to measure pair production of Higgs bosons, which would give us deeper insights into the properties of the Higgs boson. Another project, lead by UU, searches for new exotic particles which might indicate that the Higgs boson in not an elementary particle. Yet another project at UU looks for new exotic particles which might constitute the dark matter in the universe. Also the ATLAS groups at KTH, LU and SU have extensive research programmes to understand different aspects of the Higgs boson and to search for new particles beyond the Standard Model. The Swedish involvement in the ALICE experiment is at Lund University, where one of the main research projects is to study the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), with the goal to understand the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang.
KTH and the universities in Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala were among the founding institutes for the ALICE and ATLAS experiments in the early 1990'ies, and have had long term commitments for the operation and maintenance of the detectors since.
The ATLAS and ALICE experiments are parts of the infrastructure around the LHC at the particle physics laboratory CERN outside Geneva in Switzerland. This is a unique research environment that enables fundamental research that cannot be conducted anywhere else in the world, where scientific creativity can flourish and frequent international contacts are the norm.
The funding will be used for the participating universities' continued involvement in the ATLAS and ALICE experiments. Unlike the accelerators at CERN, which are funded through convention-bound membership fees, the ALICE and ATLAS experiments are built and operated by universities and research institutes from around the world. Through the granted funding, the Swedish groups which perform research at the two experiments can contribute to the operation. This includes shifts at the experiments, maintenance of hardware and software, as well as quality control work, which is necessary for the experiments to function and be able to efficiently collect data of a high quality. The collected data can then be used in our research (which is not funded by this grant).