Faculty member earns $360,000 grant for high energy physics research

Dr. Marc Baarmand, Florida Tech professor of physics and space sciences, has received a $360,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for research aimed at discovering the origin of mass. This grant is in addition to over $740,000 that the DOE has previously funded Baarmand for his work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) project. The project, involving a small army of scientists from all over the world, is located at the European Center for Particle Physics, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

The CMS project, an array of large particle detectors, is now in the final stages of construction. The gigantic experiment, the size of a five-story building, encompasses several million electronic readout channels that record data on proton-on-proton collisions that happen every 25 nano-seconds (one billionth of a second). The experiment sits in a tunnel beneath the earth, where CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a proton accelerator, is reaching completion.

The CMS and the LHC are due to start operation in mid-2007. At that time, Baarmand will join other scientists in collecting data from proton-proton collisions.

Florida Tech offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics and a bachelor's degree in pre-professional physics.

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