UC Davis physicists have leadership roles in a major project planned for the new high-energy particle accelerator being built at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, near Geneva. They are devising systems to find evidence of a particle called the Higgs boson, believed to be an essential component of matter that has not yet been detected. Clear evidence of the Higgs boson may come from its decay into elementary particles known as muons. The new accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, will have two particle detectors that will look for muons, and the Davis researchers are playing a key role in one of them, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). "UC Davis is one of only a few U.S. universities that joined the CMS collaboration as a charter member in 1992," says Prof. Winston Ko, who is the muon software coordinator and a leader of the Davis CMS effort. "It's exciting to participate in the development of this new collider, which truly represents the long-term future of high-energy physics." UC Davis' major responsibilities on the project include developing: -- An analog memory device that will store the huge number of signals produced in proton collisions until computers can select and record the information. -- A precision device to measure the trajectories of electrically charged particles deflected in the magnetic field of the CMS. -- The computer software infrastructure for studying muons in the CMS. .