News Release
Carleton University one of Nine Canadian University Partners Involved in the Biggest Science Experiment in History
(Ottawa, April 18, 2006)—The biggest science experiment in history is currently underway at the world-famous CERN lab in Switzerland, and Canada and Carleton University are poised to play a critical role in its success. Thanks to a $10.5 million investment announced today by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an ultra-sophisticated computing facility—the ATLAS Data Centre—will be created to support the ATLAS project at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Carleton is one of nine Canadian university partners, and 34 around the world, involved in the ATLAS project. The CFI initiative is spearheaded by Simon Fraser University.
“I am delighted with CFI's funding of this initiative for the ATLAS project,” says Carleton University Physics Professor Gerald Oakham who is currently on sabbatical at CERN working on ATLAS. “This new data centre will be crucial for our analysis of the vast quantity of information that will flow from the ATLAS experiment. This facility is key to our exploration of new physics such as the origin of particle mass and the hunt for mysterious “dark matter.”
The Carleton ATLAS team consists of principal investigator, Gerald Oakham, Canada Research Chair in Experimental Particle Physics and Associate Professor, Manuella Vincter, new faculty member Assistant Professor David Asner, four graduate students, and two Research Associates.
“As a result of the high energy proton collisions taking place within the ATLAS detector, it is expected that the data-taking rate will result in several Peta-bytes (millions of Gigabytes) of data every year,” says Dr. Vincter. “The new ATLAS data center at TRIUMF will ensure that we have direct and immediate access to this data enabling Carleton to take full advantage of the ATLAS physics discovery potential when data are first taken in 2007.”
The ATLAS Data Centre will be housed at TRIUMF, the national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver-owned and operated by a consortium of Canadian universities including Carleton University. Vice-President (Research and International) Feridun Hamdullahpur is the chairman of TRIUMF’s board of management.
Installation will begin this summer, with full-scale testing slated to begin in the early fall. The Centre will serve to filter, analyze and store data generated by the ATLAS project, a cutting-edge particle physics experiment set to take place at CERN’S LHC once construction is completed in 2007. The LHC will be the most powerful and sophisticated particle accelerator in the world, capable of reproducing ‘Big Bang’ like conditions by smashing particles together that have been accelerated to velocities just shy of the speed of light. A central part of the LHC facility will be the ATLAS detector, an instrument engineered to measure the after effects of those collisions, information that will allow physicists to study nature at its most fundamental level. With roughly 40 million collisions per second, the detector is set to generate enormous amounts of data, enough data, in fact, to fill 4.5 million CDs a year, a stack that would be ten CN Towers high.
The University partners involved in this project are: University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, Carleton University, McGill University, Université de Montréal, Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto, University of Victoria, and York University.
Department of Physics at Carleton UniversityCarleton University’s Physics Department does the highest impact physics research in Canada according to a 2005 issue of Science Watch. Papers published by Carleton’s Physics faculty between 2000 and 2004 received an average of 22 citations per paper, the highest in the country. Carleton University is also the administrator of the internationally renowned SNOLAB, a new permanent facility that is being constructed two kilometres underground in INCO’s Creighton Mine in Sudbury. It will continue the amazing research from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment to answer critical and fundamental questions behind the origin of the universe and the nature of matter. Carleton Physics Professor, David Sinclair, is the Director of SNOLAB. He is assisted by a team of Carleton particle physicists.
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For more information:
Lin Moody
Media Relations
Carleton University
520-2600 ext. 8705
Dr. Manuella Vincter
Canada Research Chair, Experimental Particle Physics
520-2600 ext. 1567
