Using Silicon Trackers for High Energy Physics

Aaron Dominguez
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Silicon particle trackers are a crucial component to modern high energy collider experiments. Recent results from the DZERO experiment at Fermilab using this technology to search for evidence of the Higgs Boson will be discussed. The CMS experiment at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland will begin taking collision data this year with the largest silicon tracker ever built. The UNL high energy physics team helped build part of this detector called the forward pixel detector, which plays a key role in pattern recognition and track reconstruction in the proton-proton collisions of CMS. This new detector will be discussed as well as the general technique of using silicon trackers to do particle physics.