Professor K.K. Gan of the Department of Physics has been elected to be the Chair of the Institute Board of the Pixel 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 a silicon detector as its core. The silicon detector is a very high-resolution camera with over 100 million pixels. The “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 pixel detector was fabricated at a cost of about 76 million dollars. The collaboration has an Institute Board with one representative from each institution in US, Canada, Europe, China and Japan. The Board oversees the operation of the detector by a team of scientists, engineers and technicians. Professor Gan has been elected by the 44-member Institute Board to be the Chair of the Institute Board with the term of office from November 1,2022 to October 31, 2024.