Professor K.K. Gan of the Department of Physics has been elected the Chair of the Institute Board of the Inner detector of the ATLAS experiment. The experiment was designed to study proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. LHC collides protons with the highest energy and intensity in the world. The ATLAS experiment, together with the CMS experiment, discovered the Higgs boson which led to the 2013 Nobel Prize. ATLAS is a gigantic scientific instrument with Inner Detector as its core. The Inner Detector comprises of three precision tracking systems, silicon pixel detector, silicon strip detector, and Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT). The pixel detector is a very high-resolution detector with over 100 million pixels. The strip detector contains 6 million “micro-strips” of silicon sensors. The TRT contains 300,000 thin-walled drift tubes (“straws”). The Inner Detector (“camera”) takes 40 million pictures a second and must survive the intense radiation from the proton-proton collisions. Professor Gan led the effort in the fabrication of the state-of-the-art optical electronics for the data transmission and control of the pixel detectors.

The Inner Detector was fabricated at a cost of about 200 million dollars and were built by 97 institutions in Europe, US, and Japan. The Institution Board of the Inner Detector oversees the operation of the three detector systems by a team of scientists, engineers and technicians. The team of office is two years.