The federal government through one of its research-funding agencies, the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), is investing $8.7 million in new funding in two major national research projects involving Simon Fraser University.
One is the Prometheus Project: B.C.'s Multi-Institution Advanced Materials Science and Engineering Initiative, receiving $7.7 million. The other is the upgrade to the ATLAS Tier-1 Data Analysis Centre, receiving $1 million.
Led by Mike Vetterli, a physics professor at SFU and TRIUMF, this project involves collaborating with scientists internationally to upgrade a component of a global network of always-on computing centres. Collectively, they form the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG).
The Canadian scientists collaborating with Vetterli on this project are at several research-intensive universities. They include Carleton University, McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, University of Victoria, Université de Montréal, and York University, as well as TRIUMF. It's Canada's national lab for particle and nuclear physics research.
The grid for ATLAS, which has 10 Tier-1 centres internationally, is essentially a gigantic storage and processing facility for data collected from the ATLAS experiment. The new CFI funding will enable Vetterli and his research partners to purchase equipment to upgrade the Tier-1 centre at TRIUMF in Vancouver, where the equipment will remain.
ATLAS is a multi-purpose particle detector inside a massive atom-smashing collider housed at CERN, the world's leading laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland.
More than 3,000 scientists internationally, including Vetterli and many others at SFU, use ATLAS to conduct experiments aimed at furthering global understanding of how the universe was physically formed and operates.
The detector's fame for being a window into nature's true inner workings was redoubled last year. It helped scientists, including Vetterli and others at SFU, discover a particle that has properties consistent with the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs, a Scottish physicist, and other scientists theorized in 1964 about the existence of the long-sought-after particle that is central to the mechanism that gives subatomic particles their mass.
Scientists now need to upgrade the WLCG to accommodate the massive volume of data they're reviewing to confirm that the newly discovered particle is the Higgs boson. If it is, it will revolutionize the way we see mass in physics.
"This project will enable Canadian scientists to continue to play a leading role in ATLAS physics analysis projects such as the Higgs boson discovery," says Vetterli. "Much more work and data are required to learn more about the Higgs-like particle and show that it is indeed the missing link to our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter."
-- from a Simon Fraser University press release