[News-releases] Canadian Particle Physics Team Announces World-Record Search

[Tim Meyer]

News Release | For Immediate Release | July 26th, 2010

Canadian Particle Physics Team Announces World-Record Search

The ATLAS Collaboration, a team of 3,000 scientists from 38 countries,
announced world records in the search for new particles created in
high-energy proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.  The
results from the first LHC data, shown this week at the International
Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris, France, provide the most
sensitive probe ever performed for new forms of matter. Canadian researchers
played a central role in these searches setting new limits on the mass of
such new particles, with a sensitivity superior to that achieved by another
research team working at the LHC and two research teams working at the
Fermilab proton-antiproton collider.

Dr. Pierre Savard, a Professor at the University of Toronto and TRIUMF
scientist who is one of the two conveners of the Exotics physics group of
the ATLAS collaboration, said of this result: "This is an important
milestone for ATLAS and the LHC. It signals that we are now exploring
uncharted territory at the high energy frontier".  
 
The Canadian research team examined over 200 million proton-proton
collisions, looking for collisions that produced particles hundreds of times
heavier than ordinary matter.  Various theories predict such objects, known
as "excited quarks", and if observed they would revolutionize our
understanding of matter and the forces that cause particles to bind
together, or interact in other ways.  Finding no evidence of such particles,
the team was able to exclude their existence below a mass of 1,290 GeV/c2 at
95% confidence level.
 
The analysis of the huge data sample was only made possible with the large
computing resources Canadian scientists had available through Compute
Canada, in particular at SciNet and WestGrid, as well as at the dedicated
ATLAS Data Centre at the TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver, B.C.  Dr. Robert
McPherson, the spokesperson for the Canadian ATLAS collaboration and a
research scientist at the Institute of Particle Physics, said "This
important result was made possible only through a focused effort on the part
of the Canadian scientists, with graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and
university faculty working closely to be able to push the envelope so far so
quickly."

Funded by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the ATLAS Canada research team is
now working with their collaborators to collect more data as the LHC
continues to ramp up in the rate of collisions.

For more information about Canadian involvement in the LHC and ATLAS, see
http://www.atlas-canada.ca/. 

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ATLAS Canada			      ATLAS Exotic Searches
TRIUMF
Rob McPherson, Spokesperson	Pierre Savard, Professor
Tim Meyer, Head, Communications
University of Victoria/IPP	University of Toronto/TRIUMF		Tel:
604-222-7674
Tel: 604-222-7654			Tel: 416-978-2931
Cell: 650-464-8955
E-mail: rmcphers at uvic.ca		E-mail: savard at physics.utoronto.ca
E-mail: tmeyer at triumf.ca



********************************************************
Timothy I. Meyer, Ph.D.
Head, Strategic Planning & Communications
TRIUMF
4004 Wesbrook Mall
Vancouver, BC  V6T 2A3  CANADA
Tel: 604-222-7674
Fax: 604-222-3791
Cell: 650-464-8955
E-mail: tmeyer at triumf.ca
WWW: http://www.triumf.ca
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