It is an old tradition at MIT that departments, laboratories and centers (DLCs) are reviewed on a regular basis by an outside committee. The advantages of such a review are immediately obvious. External people help to break out of the bubble of the local institute vision and provide important feedback on how well things are going, as seen by external experts. The external experts can also help to amplify asks to the School of Science or the MIT administration in general. This is true in particular for issues that are common and valid across the lab that need to be addressed. Therefore there is usually a careful discussion among the faculty to review the situation.
The Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) at MIT is no exception, and an external review, the Dean’s Review takes place every two years. The year 2024 was marked as a Dean’s Review and we did our ‘usual Spiel’ with making an agenda and the discussion of the overall plan. The committee for the review was as usual well selected and we were looking forward with some moderate excitement for this review. Two years ago the review had been done over video so it had been a while that a committee was present in the room. Sitting in the review was going to give all of LNS an opportunity to see what everybody was up to and a perfect opportunity to talk with external experts in the field.
The review was an excellent show of all the great physics that is going on in the lab and the reviewers did a great job in asking the right questions and identifying the issues that we want help with. The feedback was excellent on the physics and we are looking forward to see the full review and how much help we are going to receive from the administration. 🙂
The physics program of the PPC is centered around the use of muons which are the preferred particle of the collaboration; because why else would we call ourselves the Compact Muon Solenoid. The program is build of a healthy mix of precision electroweak measurements (mW, mZ, pT W/Z, alphas_S … maybe sin2ThetaWEff) and searches for new physics in rare decays and more exotic dark matter searches (Dark Photons and SUEPs). Of course we also like the Higgs which is why we do rare Higgs decays as well.