Neubauer receives 2011 NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor of Physics Mark S. Neubauer has been awarded a prestigious 2011 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) initiative selects the nation's best young university faculty in a highly competitive annual program. These teacher-scholars are recognized for their extraordinary promise to integrate research and education in the nation's universities and to make lifelong contributions to their disciplines. Neubauer will use the five-year award to develop a fast hardware tracker (FTK) system as an upgrade to the current trigger system for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

In hadron collider experiments such as ATLAS, triggering the detector to store interesting events for later analysis is extremely challenging because of the huge numbers and multiple types of particles produced in the collisions. The FTK system, which is being designed to exploit unique signatures in the detectors used to track charged particles, will be critical in maintaining optimum efficiency and stability for the ATLAS trigger as the luminosity of the LHC increases over time.

In addition to the FTK hardware work, Neubauer will also develop innovative strategies for processing, analyzing, and visualizing the petabytes of data being generated by ATLAS.

"This project will significantly advance the use of hardware and computing parallelization and collaborative visualization as tools to develop the new standard model," said Neubauer. "It will lead to new strategies for handling petabyte-scale data for scientific discovery and for implementing highly parallelized pattern-recognition systems for use in triggering at hadron collider experiments. The long-term objective of this project is to advance research and education in physics through the innovative use of state-of-the-art electronics and computing systems that will take parallel processing to the extreme."
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Contact: Mark Neubauer, Department of Physics, 217/244-3913.

Writer: Celia M. Elliott, Department of Physics, 217/244-7725.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.