Heads of Laboratories
Professor
Laboratory of Experimental High Energy Physics
Konstantin.Goulianos@rockefeller.edu
In an attempt to understand the creation, evolution and eventual fate of the universe, Dr. Goulianos and his colleagues study the basic constituents of matter and their interactions, watching as particles are accelerated to very high energies and brought into head-on collisions. Their research is concentrated at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider in Illinois and at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
A large fraction of the energy in particle collisions is converted into particles flying away from the collision point in a fashion reminiscent of exploding fireworks. Most of the created particles have an ephemeral existence, decaying after a brief period of time into more stable ones. Detailed studies of the properties of all known particles have revealed an inner order, which has been coded into a theoretical framework known as the Standard Model. Matter in all its forms, from stars to living organisms, can be described in terms of 12 fundamental particles, six quarks and six leptons, interacting among themselves by exchanging force particles — gluons, photons or W and Z bosons — following strict mathematical rules based on symmetry principles.
Founded in 1970, Dr. Goulianos’s laboratory has made substantial contributions to establishing the Standard Model as the premier theory of particle physics. Experiments of lab members at the Intersecting Storage Rings at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, were among the first to provide evidence for the existence of quarks through the measurement of high transverse momentum particle production. In other experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the team discovered and measured the rate of neutrino-proton elastic scattering, confirming the neutral current interactions predicted by and essential to the foundation of the Standard Model. And using the Fermilab Tevatron, the Goulianos laboratory contributed to the discovery of the top quark.
Despite its phenomenal predictive power, the Standard Model is far from the “theory of everything.” It does not incorporate gravity and has no obvious explanation for dark matter or dark energy, of which most of the universe is made. The ultimate theory, the “DNA of nature,” is still at large. Using data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) at the proton-antiproton Tevatron collider, Dr. Goulianos and his colleagues have been performing searches for the Higgs particle, the quantum of the field that could explain the diversity of quark masses, and for supersymmetry and extra dimensions, theoretical ideas aimed at accommodating gravity and explaining dark matter and dark energy. These searches are continuing with an upgraded CDF detector, in which the Goulianos laboratory has made seminal contributions to several crucial detector components, including the plug calorimeter, the shower maximum detector and the scintillator tile preshower detector. Combined, this work has led to more than 600 publications in refereed journals.
The interest of the Goulianos laboratory in the current Tevatron run is in the areas of Higgs searches, studies of top quark and jet production relevant to physics beyond the Standard Model and understanding diffractive phenomena. The latter provide a window to non-perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a component of the Standard Model important for understanding the structure of strongly interacting particles. In addition, the team is conducting searches for supersymmetry, a beyond-the-Standard Model theory that predicts a whole spectrum of new particles.
The Goulianos laboratory also participates in the international collaboration of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC is designed to collide protons at energies seven times higher and rates 100 times higher then those achieved at the Tevatron. Team members have been working on measuring the energies of jets (the streams of particles that are emitted when quarks or gluons interact) and developing statistical techniques. Measuring the directions and energies of the particles in a jet allows scientists to, for instance, differentiate the Higgs’s mass from its decay products, while statistical techniques help optimize the data analysis. The LHC was completed and commissioned in the fall of 2009, taking the lead as the world’s largest particle accelerator.
Carrying the experience gained at the Tevatron to the LHC, Dr. Goulianos and his team plan to continue their current program, concentrating initially on diffractive physics and supersymmetry.
CAREER
Dr. Goulianos was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and studied chemistry at the University of Thessaloniki, where he completed his
undergraduate course requirements in 1958. Later that year he came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and earned his
Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1963. He continued at Columbia as a research associate until 1964, when he joined
Princeton University as an instructor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1967. Dr. Goulianos joined Rockefeller as associate
professor in 1971 and was named professor in 1981. Dr. Goulianos is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
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