Ohio State Media Sources on Higgs Boson

As researchers at CERN and Fermilab announce new results this week, several members of the Ohio State University faculty are available to talk about experiments and possible discoveries at both laboratories.

Ohio State is one of only a few American institutions with faculty members participating in three different experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Two Ohio State researchers also work for a complementary experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron collider at the same time.

At both laboratories, physics have searched for decades to find evidence of exotic particles that were predicted to exist since the 1960s. Only one predicted particle has yet to be definitively found: the Higgs boson, which physicists believe gives the property of mass to other particles.

Faculty members at Ohio State who are hunting the Higgs Boson:

Christopher S. Hill, associate professor of physics - on travel to Melbourne for LHC announcement, and best reached by cell: (614) 208-4860 or email: Hill.1369@osu.edu
Hill is deputy physics coordinator for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, and responsible for overseeing all analyses of CMS data.

L. Stanley Durkin, professor of physics - (614) 292-6948; Durkin.2@osu.edu
With 19 years of experience at CERN, Durkin and T.Y. Ling, professor emeritus of physics, designed and built a greater portion of the Endcap Muon System electronics for CMS. Durkin is also able to speak to the larger implications of finding the Higgs particle.

Richard Kass, professor of physics - (614) 292-6958; Kass.1@osu.edu
With K.K. Gan and Harris Kagan -- both professors of physics -- Kass developed computer chips for the pixel detectors within the LHC's ATLAS experiment.

Richard Hughes, professor of physics - (614) 292-3885; Hughes.319@osu.edu
Brian Winer, professor of physics - (614) 292-8996; Winer.12@osu.edu
With more than 25 years of experience at the Tevatron, Hughes and Winer created particle-hunting computer algorithms called neural networks, which mimic the learning process of the human brain. While still working at Fermilab, the two joined the LHC's CMS experiment a year ago.

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