Caltech's Harvey Newman, professor of physics, has been granted a lifetime achievement award by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of High Energy Physics. Newman leads a team of Caltech researchers who work with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland—the world's most powerful particle accelerator that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Newman did much of the design and development work on the crystal detectors that are now used in the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of seven particle detectors at the collider. He also conceived and developed the worldwide grid of networks and data centers that stores and processes the flood of data coming from LHC.
The citation of the award, signed by Cherry A. Murray, director of the Office of Science of DOE, reads, "In recognition of your leadership role in architecting, developing and operating state-of-the-art international networks and collaborative systems serving the high energy and nuclear physics communities in the past 3 decades, and in particular your leadership in developing and promoting the worldwide computing model for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that was crucial for the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Your contributions are greatly appreciated by the Office of High Energy Physics and the high energy physics research community."
More information about the award is online at http://hep.caltech.edu/cms/newman-doe/index.html.
Written by Whitney Clavin