NIU Today

Over the weekend, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator began its second act. After two years of upgrades and repairs, proton beams once again circulated around the Large Hadron Collider, located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It’s an important and exciting project for scientists and students in the Northern Illinois University physics department...

Seventeen high school students from across the region visited NIU Friday to learn about the mysteries of particle physics and what goes on in some of the world’s leading scientific laboratories. NIU Physics professors Dhiman Chakraborty and Michael Eads, along with science teacher Elisa Gatz of Sterling High School, led a daylong lesson on Wednesday as part of...

Northern Illinois University physics professor Dhiman Chakraborty is preparing to reprise his popular talk on the mysterious Higgs boson for the DeKalb community. For decades, the Higgs boson was the holy grail of particle physics. Its detection confirms the existence of the Higgs field, which permeates the universe and gives particles mass. Without the Higgs...

Famously dubbed the “God particle,” the Higgs boson took thousands of scientists nearly five decades to discover, at a cost that one journalist estimated at $13.25 billion. Over the past 18 months, there has been plenty of hype about “the Higgs,” beginning with the boson’s discovery in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN...

NIU Presidential Research Professor Dhiman Chakraborty is one of more than two dozen physicists featured in a video contest sponsored by symmetry. Symmetry is a a magazine about particle physics for the general public published by Fermilab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Editors asked 29 scientists to explain why particle physics matters – in about a...

Accompanied by their teachers, a dozen high school students visited DeKalb this week to participate in the 2013 QuarkNet Summer Institute hosted by the NIU Department of Physics. QuarkNet, founded in 1995, is a professional teacher development program funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Its goal is to involve...

NIU’s Department of Physics is preparing to host the final workshop for Fermilab’s world famous DZero experiment. About 70 attendees are expected for the collaboration’s 30th annual workshop, which will be held from Friday, June 7, through Tuesday, June 11. Over the years, the collaboration has involved 82 institutions from 18 countries and hundreds of...

It’s been said that every ending marks a new beginning. So it is with the search for the Higgs boson, an elusive elementary particle that has captured the attention and imagination of scientists and the general public alike. In what appears to be a landmark discovery, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe...

Northern Illinois University particle physicists and thousands of their colleagues across the world are looking forward to fireworks of a different sort on the Fourth of July. Just yesterday, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia announced that scientists there – after more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the laboratory’s Tevatron...

Three Ph.D. students in the Department of Physics — all of whom are members of NIU’s team of researchers working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based at the CERN research facility near Geneva, Switzerland — recently have won highly competitive awards. Chad Suhr was awarded a one-year $30,000 fellowship from theArgonne National Laboratory to continue...

One is shedding light on the subatomic bits of matter that are the building blocks of nature, while the other is contributing to the understanding and conservation of reptiles and amphibians.   Despite such disparate fields of research, physicist Dhiman Chakraborty and biologist Richard King, the newly named 2011 Presidential Research Professors at Northern Illinois...

Not many children dream of becoming particle physicists, but Dhiman Chakraborty from a young age seemed destined for the field. Early training, guidance and inspiration from his parents helped Chakraborty win entrance into an elite high school in his native Calcutta, India. Each day, he would pass by a statue of the school’s most illustrious...