Professor Emeritus
PhD, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1963
Elementary Particle Physics Page
Bruno Gobbi's main research interest is electroweak phenomena. He also maintains a strong interest in the development and construction of particle detectors.
Gobbi is a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment which will be carried out at the European laboratory CERN. It is here that the world's highest-energy hadron collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is presently being built. It will start operating in 2007. CMS (built and operated by over 2000 scientists from 36 countries), is one of four detectors that will research particles produced in collisions at the LHC. Among the yet-unanswered questions in physics is why the particles making up what we call matter have the masses we observe in present experiments. A possible explanation is formulated in a theory predicting the existence of a new particle called the Higgs particle, which should be much heavier than the ones discovered so far. Higgs particles have a good chance of being produced and detected at this new accelerator. Other new particles expected to be produced at the LHC will be similar to ones formed at the very beginning of the universe. This is yet another topic of great scientific interest not only in particle physics, but also in cosmology.
For the CMS experiment, Gobbi is working mostly at Fermilab with a group of 49 scientists from 8 American universities (collaborating with European counterparts) on the design and construction of a silicon pixel detector. This is a novel type of detector, made of many millions of pixels (each about 100 microns). It will become part of the CMS detector and allow the identification of particles. Gobbi has technical and fiscal responsibility for this US collaboration.
Selected Publications
- V. M. Abazov, B. Abbott, M. Abolins, et al.
The Upgraded DO Detector
Nuc. Instr. & Meth. Phys. A565, 463 (2006) - W. Adam, T. Bergauer, M. Friedl, et al.
The Effect of Highly Ionising Particles on the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker
Nuc. Instr. & Meth. Phys. A543, 463 (2005) - P. L. Frabetti, H. W. K. Cheung, J. P. Cumalat, et al.
On the Narrow Dip Structure at 1.9 GeV/c2 in Diffractive Photoproduction
Physics Letters B578, 290 (2004) - M. Atac et al.
Beam Test Results of the US-CMS Forward Pixel Detector
Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A488, 271 (2002) - B. Abbott et al.
Hard Single Diffraction in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at s½ = 630 GeV and 1800 GeV
Phys. Lett. B531, 52 (2002)
