Working Group

Presently below mentioned groups are working in this department.

The High Energy Physics group at NCP is involved with the research into the fundamental constituents of nature and their interactions. It is a part of CMS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. The worldwide research program at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the focus of experimental particle physics now and during the coming decade. This collider allows the study of proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 14 TeV and a luminosity of 1034cm-2s-1. CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid detector is one of the four gigantic and multipurpose detectors being built for experimentation at the LHC. The High Energy Physics (HEP) group at NCP is a part of CMS collaboration and group members are working on different aspects of CMS in terms of hardware as well as software.

Hardware Project of RPCs

Under the MoU signed between CERN and Pakistan in 1994, Pakistan was responsible for assembly, testing, installation and commissioning of 288 Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) for CMS detector. The project is near completion now and since March 30, 2010, the LHC has been running at 7TeV centre of mass energy. RPCs being a part of CMS experiment are running with full potential to collect the LHC collision data. Presently 97.5% endcap RPCs are in data taking mode and rest 2.5% have different kinds of problems which requires the access of the disks to fix these. Temperature and humidity sensors at the chambers are 100% and the racks temperature sensors are 94% working. Overall the RPCs are in good shape as rest of the CMS detectors.

Grid Computing

The large amount of data produced at CERN needs a very sophisticated and efficient way of storage and computing setup. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) makes available a large amount of distributed computing, storage and network resources for data processing. NCP is the part of Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and we are managing a grid node since 2004.

Certification Authority

PK-GRID-CA is Pakistan's first Certification Authority and managed by NCP which provides X.509 certificates to support the secure environment in grid computing. It issues User and Host Certificates to people and sites participating in grid computing in collaboration/partnership with NCP. Currently there are 45 active certificates. 101 user and 74 host certificates have been issued until now. 95 certificates have been expired and 35 have been revoked.

Network Security

With the involvement of Information Technology in almost every field, cyber security has become a major concern for all. Pakistan Education and Research Network (PERN2) being a national network facility for universities and research organization requires measures to be taken for security of information. NCP is already following many things communicated by HEC for network security and IT policy for NCP has been revised in this respect.

Work with ATLAS-TDAQ-SYSADMINS Group at CERN

ATLAS is the largest experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) running at CERN. Prof. Dr. Marzio Nessi, the technical coordinator for ATLAS asked for help of the NCP IT people in mnaging the ATLAS computing farm during his visit in 2006. Since September 2006, seven members of the NCP IT team have visited CERN for working in ATLAS experiment as part of TDAQ-SysAdmins team. Technical work covers almost all aspects of system administration including central management of user accounts and roles, role based access control (RBAC), web servers, file servers, FTP servers, LDAP servers, DHCP servers, syslog servers, user support and troubleshooting, installation repositories and images for net-booted machines, resource management/monitoring, scripting for automating monitoring and management tasks, customized software development, and remote management of machines etc.

Current Status of the LHC

The LHC machine is running at 7 TeV, centre of mass energy for past few months. The data has been collected and is currently used for detector performance and calibration studies. Many known particles have been rediscovered.

Physics and Data Analysis

We have a group of researchers and physicists working on different aspects of physics. The main focus is on heavy flavour physics which involves study of heavy quarks i.e. charm, bottom and top. The top quark is the heaviest known fundamental particle and precise measurement of its mass is important for many aspects of particle physics such as constraining higgs mass and understanding supersymmetry. Although it was discovered in 1995 but due to limited statistics its production has not been studied in detail. LHC is a top factory and we expect a large number of top quarks to be produced which will allow detailed study of its production and decay mechanisms. Along with top LHC is also a charm factory and we are also focusing on studies involving charm quark and its decays. Given the LHC energies we hope to be able to produce results with small amount of early machine data.

At the moment there are 4 Ph.D and 2 M.Phil students of QAU, and 2 MS students of Karachi University who are doing their research work. 3 students from IIUI and 3 from CASE have completed their B.S degree projects. 3 internees are also working in the same group. Until now 9 M Phil and 2 PhD students have completed their thesis on CMS.

Research Publications

Currently there are 212 publications from CMS.

Other Projects

Reverse engineering of AC-132 system modules for KNPC