Welcome to the Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology

LPPC (formerly HEPL) carries out forefront research programs in experimental particle physics and cosmology, and provides first-rate educational opportunities for students. Our experimental program is carried out at accelerator labs around the world and addresses important questions both within and beyond the Standard Model. We have also expanded our program to include astrophysics where we will be studying the fundamental properties of dark energy. Experimental particle physics and astrophysics have remarkably similar modes of research. Apparatus is developed on campus and then deployed to off campus facilities for operation and data acquisition.  In both cases, the projects typically involve large international collaborations. Once data are acquired, the results are brought back to campus for refined analysis. The data sets are in the Terabyte regime and we will soon see Petabyte-scale experiments.

Our research program is based at Harvard's Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC), which has computing facilities for data analysis, engineering support for detector R&D, and shops for the fabrication of detectors and their readout systems.  While our educational efforts are concentrated in graduate education, undergraduate students also work on projects at LPPC. We have recently moved to new quarters: our offices and computers are located in historic Palfrey House at 18 Hammond St (see above), while our machine shop and test labs are located in the former Cambridge Electron Accelerator at 38 Oxford St (see below). In the future we plan to be moving into a larger and more modern space in the new NW interdisciplinary science building.

The faculty group leading the LPPC research program at Harvard includes:

Dr. George Brandenburg is a Senior Research Fellow and the Director of LPPC. He works on ATLAS.

Prof. Gary Feldman works with neutrinos on the MIPP, MINOS, and NOvA experiments.

Prof. Melissa Franklin is the Chair of the LPPC Faculty Committee and works on the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

Prof. Joao Guimaraes da Costa has recently joined LPPC as an Assistant Professor working on ATLAS and CDF.

Prof. John Huth works on ATLAS where he is the U.S. Associate Project Manager for Physics and Computing.

Prof. Masahiro Morii is working on ATLAS and BABAR at SLAC.

Prof. Christopher Stubbs heads our new Dark Energy group and is scientific spokesman for the LSST experiment.

In addition to the faculty group responsible for our program there are several postdoctoral research associates: Dr. Kevin Black, Dr. Shulamit Moed, Dr. Alberto Belloni, and Dr. Corrinne Mills with the ATLAS group; Dr. Sebastian Grinstein with the CDF group; and Dr. Mayly Sanchez with the Neutrino group.

The Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology facilities are available to all the groups on an equal basis. Our engineers and shops are capable of designing and building state of the art detector systems and their associated readout electronics. We have produced both prototypes for detector R&D as well as complete major systems for all of our groups. Examples of projects completed in the machine shop include: the CDF Central Tracker Upgrade, CDF Central Muon System Extension, a redesigned Interaction Region for CLEO, and the NOMAD Hadron Calorimeter. We are currently working on the production of ATLAS Muon Drift Tube chambers. The electronics shop has produced readout electronics for most of our detectors, most recently the CDF and CLEO silicon vertex detectors and the front end electronics for the MINOS far detector, and a tracking trigger upgrade for the BABAR detector. We are currently completing the readout system for the ATLAS muon detector and have begun work planning the LSST and NOvA readout electronics..

The LPPC technical staff consists of an electronics engineer, Dr. John Oliver, his assistant, Nathan Felt, an electronics technician, Sarah Harder, and a machinist, Steve Sansone. The administrative staff consists of the lab director and the lab coordinator, Robyn Simpson. 

In addition to engineering and shops, LPPC has workstations, personal computers, and associated peripherals which are available to all the groups for data analysis, documentation, and communication with collaborators. We also have a computing cluster which consists of a sixteen 2.5 GHz nodes together with 20 TBytes of RAID storage. Finally a video conferencing system also exists at LPPC for remote participation in meetings at the accelerator labs or at other universities.