Steven P. Ahlen

Professor of Physics, College of Arts & Sciences

Professor Ahlen is currently active in the installation and commissioning of high precision tracking chambers for the “ATLAS” experiment at the “Large Hadron Collider” (the LHC, which will be completed in 2008 near Geneva, Switzerland). The tracking chambers occupy a region the size of a five story building, and will measure the trajectories of muons in a magnetic field with a precision better than 1/10 of a millimeter. This permits the determination of the muon momentum, which will be an important ingredient in searches for new phenomena at the LHC energy, which is an order of magnitude greater than currently available. Professor Ahlen is also participating in the development of a new detector for searching for dark matter.