Experimental Particle Physics
The Experimental Particle Physics research group takes part to experiments installed at particle accelerators involving extremely wide and international research teams. The activity is centered at the international CERN laboratory located in Geneva (Switzerland), where the Large Hadron Collider is currently operating producing proton-proton collisions at energy of 13 TeV.
The group, composed of faculty, researchers, post-docs and graduate students, works in close connection with the Department of Physics of the University of Pisa with the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN, Sezione di Pisa), which provides the financial support to the groups in which the SNS personnel is involved. The members of the group are mainly involved in the CMS and LHCb experiments financially supported by the INFN-CSN1 (Particle Physics with Accelerators).
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider. It has a broad physics programme ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson properties) to searching for extra dimensions and super-symmetric particles with mass up to few TeV, and for particles that could make up dark matter. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving 5000 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from about 200 institutes in 50 countries. CMS is currently operating and taking data.
The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is one of the particle physics experiments installed at the Large Hadron Collider. It is an international collaboration of about 1000 physicists from around the world, and is dedicated to the investigation of all aspects of the physics of heavy flavors. LHCb has access to the largest samples of bottom and charm quarks ever seen, and its mission is to perform a high-sensitivity exploration of the central physics questions of the post-Higgs era, including the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry and the existence of possible new and unknown fundamental interactions. LHCb is currently operating and taking data.
The members of the group are also involved in other experiments such as the Muon g-2 experiment installed at the FermiLab accelerator (Chicago USA) which has the aim of examining the precession of muons that are subjected to a magnetic field. The main goal is to test the Standard Model's predictions of the “g-2” value of the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of a muon by measuring the precession rate experimentally to a precision of 0.14 parts per million. The group is also contributing to the MUonE project which aims at a completely independent and very precise measurement of the leading hadronic contribution to the muon magnetic moment.
The group is also a main contributor to the RETINA project, a R&D effort aiming at demonstrating the feasibility of a real-time tracking device based on the so-called "Artificial Retina Algorithm", able to fulfill the needs of Level-0 trigger of the LHC experiments (bunch crossing frequency of 40MHz), through the designing and realization of hardware prototypes implemented on commercial field-programmable gate array (FPGA).