CMS should start taking data in 2009. At that time the
LHC accelerator will be the worlds highest energy facility. We are helping
to build triggering components of the detector. These are very fast
electronics systems that contain artificial intelligence to decide what
data is interesting to keep.
Graduate Research Opportunities:
Before going to graduate school in physics you should be sure that
you really want to do it. You will be expected to work long and hard on
difficult problems. Given that the job prospects for physicists are poor
in the best of times, you should also make sure that you get experience
that is relevant to the industrial world. Fortunately given the industrial
scale of particle physics experiments - there are lots of opportunities
to do this. You also must have a burning desire to learn something about
nature. For example it really does bother me that we don't have a
quantum field theory of gravity. A theory that links gravity with
the other forces of nature invariably leads to new interactions and particles
that we can search for in particle physics experiments such as CMS
which is why I am working on that experiments. There are many opportunities
for graduate research topics including (but not limited to):
Any of the many physics topics we will study at CMS
Data acquisition and triggering systems (including circuit and logic chip
design)
C++ programing, graphical user interfaces, windows programing