John S. Conway

     Professor of Physics
     University of California, Davis

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I am a high energy physicist, studying the nature of matter, energy, space and time at the highest energies possible. The main focus of my research is at the CDF experiment at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, in which beams of protons and antiprotons collide at a center of mass energy of 2 TeV (2 trillion electron volts), equivalent to more than 2000 times the mass of a proton. These collisions produce the most massive particles known, like the top quark (discovered in CDF in 1995) and W and Z bosons (the carriers of the weak force). My own research is in the search for new particles which may exist at higher masses, and take more energy and/or beam collisions to produce.

In CDF we have new results on the search for the Higgs boson. The Higgs is believed to be the source of the mass of elementary particles, and the particles predicted by supersymmetric theories, and it may be produced in our experiment - their discovery could be just around the corner!

We will continue to run CDF for the next 3-5 years, but in the mean time construction is underway for the CMS experiment at CERN, which will run at the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider under construction there. The LHC will have seven times the energy of the Tevatron, and deliver huge numbers of proton-protion collisions. If the Higgs and other new particles are not discovered at CDF, they almost certainly will be in CMS (and in ATLAS, the other large LHC experiment).