CERN director general preview a new centre and reports on the LHC’s first year
A $25-million Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre to explore the origins of the universe immediately after the Big Bang was previewed by the Director General of CERN in Switzerland, Prof Rolf-Dieter Heuer at the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Melbourne in early December.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) will explore particle physics at terascale energies (a thousand billion electron volts) through the ATLAS experiment, which is a giant particle detector attached to Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
The Centre brings together scientists from the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide, Monash University, the University of Sydney and a host of international collaborators.
Prof Heuer was announced as the Chair of the International Advisory Committee of the ARC Centre, and its director will be Prof Geoff Taylor of the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.
“The Centre will greatly expand Australia’s role in the largest pure science enterprise on planet earth, the Large Hadron Collider,” Taylor said.