Professor Piroué and his group has been heavily involved in two major research
activities at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland: (1) the L3 experiment at the
Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, which provides high
luminosity e+e- collisions in the c.m. energy range 80-200 GeV,
and (2) the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) which is scheduled to start operation in 2005.
The Princeton group doing research at CERN consists at present
of Prof. D. Marlow
and P. Piroué, Senior Research Physicist D.
Stickland, Assistant Prof. C. Tully, Staff
Physicist S. Wynhoff, Graduate Students J. Mans and W.
Fisher, and Technical Staff both at Princeton and CERN.
In 2000 the LEP energy was increased to 209 GeV,
well beyond its original design energy, in order to
investigate tantalizing hints of a Higgs boson
at a mass of 114-115 GeV. Unfortunately the additional
data obtained in 2001 were not sufficiently
conclusive to justify further running in 2002, and hence the
CERN management decided to shut down LEP. The
dismantling of the detectors took place at the
beginning of 2001.
The L3 experiment was one of four LEP
experiments. Its main goals were the search for new particles,
such as the Higgs boson, and the undertaking of
precision tests of the Standard Model at the Z0
resonance and above the W+W- production
threshold. The Princeton group played a leading role in the
experiment, both in the detector construction
and data analysis. More than 250 papers have been
published. A comprehensive summary of the most
significant research accomplished can be found below.
CMS is one of the two general-purpose detectors being constructed at
the LHC to study p-p collisons at 14 TeV c.m. energy. The main
physics objectives are searches for the Higgs boson(s), supersymmetry, and of course
new phenomena. The Princeton group is involved in three areas: (1) the
development of the CMS software and computing environment for US-based
physicists, (2) the level 1 trigger and (3) the high-precision crystal
electromagnetic calorimeter.
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