Our Collaboration
People
The DØ Collaboration is a group of physicists from laboratories and universities from around the world. We are divided among three general professional levels:
Senior Ph.D. Scientists
These are laboratory physicists and university professors who have generally been involved in research for a number of years. At laboratories, physicists are generally in charge of construction and design of accelerator, detector, and software projects with both hands-on and supervisory responsibilities. Typically, support for individual scientists at the laboratories comes as a negotiation and competitive decision process within the overall laboratory budgets. Within the universities, professors are members of smaller groups. In all likelihood, all professors teach full time in their universities and they manage their research affairs in off-hours or summer and vacations. In many countries, like the United States, support for university physicists is primarily competitive with the appropriate federal government. At U.S. universities, there would be little or no support for people, travel, or large equipment for research efforts. Rather, universities provide space and sometimes technical personnel and help subsidize this support by charging an "overhead" to any non-equipment support that faculty can attract from the outside. Typically, this overhead is 50% or more.
Post Doctoral Physicists
These are scientists who have recently received their Ph.D. degrees and have elected to remain in basic research rather than pursuing commercial or some governmental positions. Both universities and laboratories employ post docs and invest heavily in supporting their needs while they are employed. Typical terms of appointment used to be 2-3 years, but with increasing complexity of the experiments, it is not unusual for post docs to remain with their original employer for 4-5 years. Post docs - especially in high energy physics, which involves labs away from home universities or labs - are an important on-site representation of their home institutions and gain considerable responsibility and visibility within their large experimental collaborations.
Graduate Students
The "rite of passage" in basic research is an extensive period in graduate school - 5-7 years increasingly in physics. Students in high energy physics are expected to complete their formal "book-learning" education at their home institutions within the first 2 years or so after their undergraduate degrees. It is unusual for students to attend graduate school at their undergraduate alma mater, but it sometimes works out that way. After that time, they are given focused projects to design and implement under the guidance of their professors, post docs and laboratory employees. In high energy physics, the emphasis is on collaborative work and students quickly learn to give technical presentations and to work with colleagues from other institutions and countries. The work of the graduate student is critical to the success of high energy physics experiments and the scientific results of experiments is almost always the work of a graduate student's Ph.D. thesis. In this field, there is a concerted effort to provide the students and post docs opportunities for giving presentations at meetings around the world.
Organization
There are roughly 600 Ph.D. and graduate student physicists in this experiment. We are from 80 institutions, representing 15 nations, from 4 continents. We have had to learn how to organize ourselves into a functioning "corporate" entity, but without an identified strictly accountable organization. That is, remarkably, we are a huge volunteer organization, largely democratically run, relying on peer pressure and personal/professional reputation as the motivation. It works amazingly well and as such must violate some well-established norms of corporate structure!
We have an organizational chart, we have goals, milestones, and priorities. We have meetings - boy, do we have meetings! We manage professional engineers, programmers, and technicians - where normal accountability is practiced - interfaced to our far-flung structure through specific supervisory points of contact. We travel and we video conference around the world.
Our Apparatus
High energy experiments are nowadays distinguished by their size: they are necessarily bigger than large homes, more massive than a couple of locomotives (really?), and with more electrical signal channels than a medium city telephone exchange (check).
How particles are detected
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How the DØ apparatus is designed
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How well the DØ apparatus works
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Our Current Projects
The DØ experiment is organized primarily around general categories of physics issues. While not perfect, this does tend to concentrate particular expertise as well as physics "tastes" into common areas. Cross pollinated with the physics topics are the areas that deal with generic object areas - like electron identification, muon identification, electron energy calibration, etc.
Our physics groups are the following:
Top Quark Physics
Bottom Quark Physics
Electroweak Physics
New Phenomena
Higgs Search Physics
Quantum Chromodynamics