Department of Physics and Astronomy professors part of team that discovered new subatomic particle

At a seminar held at CERN on July 4th in Geneva, Switzerland, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long-sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV.

A team of physicists from Wayne State made important contributions to the CMS experiment. The WSU team is led by Paul Karchin, Ph.D. and Robert Harr, Ph.D., professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Team members include Caroline Milstene, Ph.D., adjunct professor of physics, Mark Mattson, Ph.D., assistant professor research, Alexandre Sakharov, research associate, Alfredo Gutierrez, research engineer and Ph.D. students Christopher Clarke, Sowjanya Gollapinni, Chamath Kottachchi, Pramod Lamichhane, and Kevin Siehl.

WSU team members are located at three key locations around the world: the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and at Wayne State's campus. The WSU team contributed to the 24/7 operation of the experiment and analysis of the data. Team members became experts with different parts of the experimental apparatus including the endcap muon detector, the hadron calorimeter, and the high-level trigger computing system.