Three Vanderbilt physicists — a professor, a graduate and an undergraduate — appear in a photo that ran at the top of the Science & Environment section of the BBC News website on Wednesday. It was taken in a control room at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland as the giant particle collider began its first scientific run following a two-year upgrade.
Associate Professor of Physics Will Johns, graduate student Andres Delannoy and undergraduate Dylan Teague are members of the international experiment team that operates one the LHC’s main detectors. Recently, they have been working full time getting their instrument ready to analyze the next round of experiments which involve collisions wih energies about 60 percent higher than the highest level achieved in the vast machine’s first run in 2010-2013 (13 trillion electron volts (TeV) up from 9 TeV.
The event was described in the BBC new story, Large Hadron Collider turns on ‘data tap’, which accompanied the photo and includes animations and video.