Physicist wins DOE's investigator award

McFarland

McFarland's research has earned him an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the Department of Energy. This award helps talented young physicists establish research programs early in their careers, and will contribute $400,000 to McFarland's five-year study, starting with $80,000 this year. McFarland will explore why subatomic particles have mass and from whence it comes by studying the top quark--the heaviest of the 12 most basic building blocks of matter.

Currently, McFarland and his team of seven students and postdoctoral researchers, including two graduate students from the University, are participating in preparations for a large-scale experiment at the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. The experiment, known as CDF, will use the Tevatron supercollider, one of the world's most powerful accelerators. Approximately 500 physicists and several hundred engineers and technicians are working on CDF.

"I think we should see our first proton-antiproton collisions in early 2000 and have usable data--top quarks--from high-intensity collisions by the end of 2000," McFarland said.

In preparation for the experiments, McFarland is leading the construction of a network of hundreds of computers that will analyze data from collisions immediately as they occur. His team is building a "farm" or cluster of 200 to 400 personal computers programmed to make decisions together. "Essentially, we're building a tremendous supercomputer out of equipment you can buy at a computer store," he said.

The computers will analyze digitized data sent to them by a detector, a device akin to a very complicated digital camera that records quarks and most other subatomic particles. A system that McFarland created will filter the tremendous amount of data as it pulses through the detector. The computer farm will then analyze and select the most interesting information from the reduced data input.

McFarland believes strongly in educating the public about the research conducted at Fermilab. He served as a mentor this summer at the lab to two high school teachers from the Rochester area as part of the QuarkNet program, a national program that partners high school teachers and scientists. Next year, those two teachers will come to the University, one of 12 QuarkNet centers, to show 10 other high school teachers how to implement physics research projects into their curricula.

In addition to winning DOE's investigator award, McFarland's research earned him recognition as a Sloan Research Fellow in 1998, the same year he joined Rochester. McFarland earned his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Chicago and his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Brown University.

Maintained by University Public Relations
Please send your comments and suggestions to:
Public Relations.