Colloquium
4 p.m.
Sept. 4 2009
Paul Sharrah Lecture Hall (Room 133)
Physics Building

Joe Izen
The University of Texas at Dallas

ATLAS, CERN and The Large Hadron Collider:

Thousands of elementary particle physicists are traveling to scenic Switzerland to spend an awful lot of time in a big hole in the ground. Do these physicists have anything common with the astronomers who go to mountain tops, only to work all night and sleep all day? Could it be something more than needing to get a life?

This fall, the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. We hope to solve some of the biggest mysteries that puzzle both particle physicists and astronomers. I will describe some of the physics motivating the LHC and the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and I'll describe what it is like to work "down in the pit" on the ATLAS Pixel detector.

Izen is Professor of Physics and Principal Investigator for UTD's elementary particle research group. Izen and his group work on the commissioning and operations of the pixel subdetector, shared inner detector systems of the Atlas experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. They are preparing to analyze data from the first LHC collisions late this fall. Izen also studies the physics of bottom and charm quarks with the BaBar experiment at SLAC. In the past, Izen has collaborated on the Cleo, Tasso, Aleph, Mark III, SLD, SDC, and BES experiments, serving as US BES Spokesperson from 1996 to 1997.

Izen received a Ph.D. in Physics (1982) and and A.M. in Physics (1978) from Harvard University. He received a B.S. in Physics and Math (1977) from The Cooper Union.