James P. Alexander
Professor of Physics
Director, Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics (LEPP)
(faculty bio)
Welcome to the website of the Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics
at Cornell University.
I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the
activities going on at our lab,
and to invite you to explore the information throughout this site.
Physicists at the Cornell Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics
(
LEPP) are exploring the
properties of weak interactions in the charm quark system, and the
intricate details of
charm particle spectroscopy. Using the Cornell Electron Storage Ring
(
CESR),
the experimental group is making some of the most precise studies
of decays that might be affected by new phenomena. The accelerator and
Superconducting RF (SRF)
groups have made numerous innovations that put CESR at the luminosity
frontier, making this
work possible.
Very soon, the Large Hadron Collider
(
LHC)
will shift the focus in particle physics
from indirect searches at the precision frontier to direct searches at
the energy frontier. Cornell
is a collaborating institution on the
CMS experiment at the LHC with
responsibilities in the
pixel detector, electromagnetic calorimeter, trigger, and core software.
Cornell physicists are
interested in the physics that lies beyond our current understanding
(usually called "the Standard Model")
and are developing strategies for analyzing the CMS data to explore this
new and unknown world. The
particle theory group at Cornell shares these interests and is working
with the experimental group to
explore novel approaches to the data.
In the next decade the International
Linear Collider (
ILC),
a high energy, high luminosity e+e- collider, will
expand on the LHC's discoveries.
The experimental, accelerator, and SRF groups are already active in the
ILC, with heavy involvement in
areas as diverse as damping ring design and prototyping, polarized
positron production, transport of
low emittance beams, high speed diagnostic instrumentation, and the
extreme limits of superconducting
accelerator technology. The particle theory group will increasingly focus
its attention on TeV-scale physics and
beyond.
Work at LEPP is connected to other scientific fields through the Cornell
High Energy Synchrotron
Source (
CHESS), an x-ray facility at CESR.
Cornell accelerator physicists have developed a strategy for an x-ray source
called the Energy Recovery
Linac (
ERL),
which would be about 1000 times brighter than existing
comparable facilities, and
would have broad application in biology, geology, medical science and
many other fields.
With
NSF support, the accelerator group is now
developing the ERL design
and prototyping key elements, working toward the goal of constructing the
ERL at Cornell.
Jim Alexander,
Ithaca, NY
July, 2007
