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The goal of high energy physics is the understanding of the elementary particles that are the fundamental constituents of matter. The fabulous success of the Standard Model has given us a framework for the interpretation of most particle interactions, but it has also created a foundation from which we can begin to explore a deeper level of issues such as the origin of mass, the preponderance of matter over antimatter in the Universe, the identity of "dark matter," the physics of the Big Bang, and the microscopic structure of space-time.

The most direct experimental path to the understanding of such issues uses particle collisions of the highest achievable energies. Following this path, Princeton physicists are deeply involved with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Switzerland). Within the next ten years, the LHC will be upgraded to increase the number of particles per collision. Its successor, the High Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC) will also require many upgrades to the CMS experiment. The Princeton CMS group is involved in research and development for many of the upgrades including the outer tracker, the MIP timing detector, the Level-1 trigger system, and computing through the IRIS-HEP software institute.

The Princeton group is also active in neutrino oscillations (the reactor experiment at Daya Bay, China) and the search for WIMP Dark Matter using liquid argon scintillation/ionization detectors (in the Gran Sasso Underground Lab in Italy.)

Princeton groups have also been previously been active in the area of CP violation with the BaBar and Belle experiments at the B Factories at SLAC (California) and KEK (Japan), respectively, and neutrino mixing with the Booster Neutrino Experiment, MiniBooNE, at Fermilab (Illinois) (see pictures). We are also taking part in research and development for a new type of accelerator, the Muon Collider/Neutrino Factory.

Whatever the size of the experiment, the Princeton groups play leading or major roles in the collaborations, and graduate students have the opportunity and are expected to be at the center of the important hardware development and physics analysis. We have the facilities in the shops and assembly areas of the Elementary Particles Laboratory to design, build, and test components of experiments to be installed at accelerator labs elsewhere. The EP Lab shops and our state-of-the-art electronics-design facilities also support an active program in the development of detection and readout techniques for future experiments.

During 2022 the Princeton HEP group has launched two Graduate Traineeship initiatives funded by the DOE, one on instrumentation and one on software/computing. 

News:

• Information regarding the Higgs Boson and Princeton's role in the discovery
• James Olsen: Perspective on the world's biggest particle collider coming online again
• Prof. Chris Tully as part of DZero collaboration is awarded The 2019 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the EPS for detailed measurement of the top quark properties.