Don't forget the universities

Don't forget the universities
Great article on the LHC and the US involvement (April 2005)--very complete and well presented. As usual, a nice job with the symmetry issue.

I'd like to comment on the sentence, "The United States contributes high-tech accelerator and detector components, developed and built by US national laboratories with some help from industry." While very true, we don't acknowledge here--as part of these projects--the incredibly important US university contribution! I have found myself guilty at times (inexcusably) of having "DOE National Lab" blinders on when talking about this project, but the efforts of approximately seventy US universities across the country on ATLAS and CMS, in collaboration with the four DOE national labs involved, needs to be clear. Aside from being most of the end "users" (doers, really) of the experiments, the universities are much more (as we and they know). Pick your state or region and you'll find a university that has contributed directly through their physics, engineering and technical staffs to the CMS or ATLAS detector design, development, fabrication, and testing at their institutions, and now in the detector installation and pre-operations work at CERN.

As part of the Federal oversight of the US LHC Project, I have been both privileged and impressed in my visits to a number of these universities during the construction work to see first-hand the facilities, capabilities and results from this effort. Scientists and students at every possible career stage (from high school/undergrad to senior scientist) have made the overall collaborations and detector construction possible. There are unique and important stories associated with many of these institutions, for example, from the work of students at Hampton University (a historically black college) building ATLAS transition radiation tracker modules, to the conversion of a pasta noodle shop near Notre Dame University into a lab for processing fiber optic cables and waveguides for CMS hadron calorimeter read-out.

Pepin T. Carolan, DOE/NSF US LHC
Project Office, Batavia, IL