The research programme of the Division is carried out mainly within large international collaborations which run their experiments in a few main research centres equipped with powerful accelerators. The principal purpose of these experiments is to study the structure of matter on subnuclear scales and the properties of fundamental forces acting among its constituents.
The experimental programme of the Division is focused on two big collider experiments currently under way – ATLAS at the LHC collider at CERN and D0 at Fermilab, as well as one from the realm of astroparticle physics – the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentine. This illustrates one of the most remarkable features of contemporary physics – ever-deeper connection of the laws of microcosm with the phenomena of macrocosm as traditionally studied by astrophysics.
The characteristic features of particle physics experiments are long-term planning and large time horizons. For these reasons we take part, within the framework of the international CALICE project, in the development of detectors for the International Linear Collider of electrons and positrons, ILC, which appears to be the most prospective accelerator facility candidate for the era after LHC.
Besides these large projects, at each of which about 10-20 physicists and technicians from the Institute of Physics participate, the Division is active, to a lesser extent, at several other experiments at CERN (ALICE, DIRAC, TOTEM). Integral part of our programme is also many-sided theoretical research. Moreover, for a long time we have studied the problems connected with the application of particle beams in medicine.
WWW Server of the Division: http://www-hep.fzu.cz
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