Industry Spotlight Education
Master of Physics
SMU professor Ryszard
Stroynowski was a
principal investigator in
the search for the Higgs
boson, nicknamed the
God Particle.
“Once you
reach a milepost, you find
out that there
is another
one ahead.”
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Simply Amazing Stuff
Y
ou may have heard that Francois Englert and
Peter Higgs just received the Nobel Prize in
physics for laying the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson. But, did you know an SMU
Department of Physics team was a major contributor
to the decades of research?
SMU physics professor, and leader of the team,
Ryszard Stroynowski, Ph.D., was a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson and served as U.S.
coordinator for the ATLAS Experiment’s Liquid Argon
Calorimeter, which measures energy from the particles
created by proton collisions. Stroynowski was joined
by other Department of Physics faculty members and
SMU students in his research.
SMU joined nearly 2,000 physicists from U.S. institutions, the majority working from their home institutions, to remotely access and analyze data through
high-capacity networks and grid computing. This was
the culmination of more than 50 years of research by
physicists and engineers around the world.
When Stroynowski was asked how it felt to be
recognized for being part of the global team that
identified the Higgs, he replied, “There are two levels
on which I can answer that question. On one level,
it is extremely gratifying that so many years of hard
work actually paid off: the detector worked very well,
it has been a pleasure to work with so many smart
people and we reached at least one of the goals we
hoped for. On another level, however, science is an
endless frontier.
“Once you reach a mile-post, you find out that
there is another one ahead,” he explained. “I am always
curious. Today the most important question for me is,
again, what is there to be found in the future, a higher
energy of the LHC – and how will it change my understanding of the universe?”
Stroynowski, who has been a physics professor at
SMU since 1991, grew up in Warsaw, Poland. His research interests lie in the area of the experimental High
Energy Particle physics and the structure of matter. In
his early work he studied the partonic structure of the
proton that provided experimental basis for the QCD
- the theory of strong interactions.
He then studied the properties of heavy quarks in
several experiments at electron - positron colliders
and led an extended effort to understand the properties of the tau lepton. Since 1996 he has worked on the
ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider aiming
at search for Higgs, supersymmetry, and new physics
phenomena accessible at highest-energy accelerators.