Acronyms of High-Energy Physics
This page is a list of acronyms of high-energy physics Laboratories and Accelerators and Detectors and Experiments and Other institutions .
Laboratories |
ANL: The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.
Bates: Not an acronym. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bates Linear Accelerator Center.
BINP: Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, Russia.
BNL: The Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, Long Island.
CERN: Originally "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire," now the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland.
DESY: Deutches Elektronen SYnchrotron laboratory in Hamburg, Germany.
ESRF: The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.
FNAL: The Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
FZK: Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a nonprofit basic science research center in Karlsruhe, Germany.
GSI: Gesellschaft für Schwerionen-forschung, a heavy-ion research center in Darmstadt, Germany.
HASYLAB: HAmburger SYnchrotronstrahlungsLABor, part of DESY.
IHEP: Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.
JINR: The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
JLAB: The Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson Newport National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, in Newport News, Va. Formerly CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility).
KEK: Koo Energy Ken. The High Energy Research Accelerator Organization in Tsukuba, Japan.
LAL:The Laboratoire de L’Accelerateur Lineaire at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France.
LANL: The Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M.
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LBNL: The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
LEPP: Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Formerly the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies (LNS).
LLNL: The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
LNF: Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, near Rome, Italy.
LNGS: Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, in L’Aquila, Italy. Usually referred to as “Gran Sasso.”
LNL: Laboratori Nazionali di Leganaro, in northern Italy.
LNS: Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, in southern Italy.
NUSEL: The National Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Proposed Sites are Soudan, MN, Homestake, SD, San Jacinto, CA, and Icicle Creek, WA.
ORNL: The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
PSI: Paul Scherrer Institut, a research facility in northern Switzerland.
SLAC: The Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California.
SSRL: SLAC Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.
TRIUMF: TRI-University Meson Facility. (Although now there are eight universities involved, TRIUMF started with three.) Located at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
WIPP: The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear waste center in New Mexico also being used as an underground laboratory.
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Accelerators
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AD: Antiproton Decelerator. New facility at
CERN to study antimatter.
AGS: The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven.
ATLAS: The Argonne Tandem Linear
Accelerator, a heavy-ion accelerator at Argonne.
AWA: The Argonne Wakefield Accelerator,
working on accelerator R&D.
B Factory: SLAC's new electron-positron collider, built to produce B mesons, beginning in 1999.
BEPC: Beijing Electron Positron Collider.
CLIC: CERN's proposed Compact LInear Collider.
CESR: The Cornell Electron Storage Ring.
A high-luminosity electron-positron collider at the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory, Cornell University.
DAFNE: (Sometimes DAPHNE) Double Annular Factory for Nice Experiments. 1.0 GeV high
luminosity phi factory at LNF in Italy.
EPA: CERN's Electron Positron Accumulator.
FMI: The Fermilab Main Injector, due to begin operating in 1999 as an injector to the Tevatron.
HERA: Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator at DESY.
ISAC: TRIUMF’s Isotope Separator and
Accelerator for astrophysics study.
ISOLDE: On-Line Isotype Mass Separator at CERN.
ILC: A proposed electron-positron collider, the ILC will stretch approximately 35
kilometers in length. Consisting of two linear accelerators that face each
other, the ILC will hurl some 10 billion electrons and their anti-particles,
positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light. The current
baseline design calls for a 500 billion-electron-volt (GeV) machine and
allows for an upgrade to a 50-kilometre, 1 trillion-electron-volt (TeV)
machine during the second stage of the project. The ILC will be designed,
funded, managed, and operated as a fully international scientific project.
KEK B-Factory: An electron-positron collider
to study CP violation in the B meson, at KEK.
LANSCE: Los Alamos Neutron Science CEnter (formerly LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility).
LEAR: Low Energy Antiproton Ring at CERN
(closed for physics in 1996, now being converted into LEIR).
LEIR: Low Energy Ion Ring, a machine that will store ions for the LHC at CERN.
LEP: The Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN. Data taking was completed in 2000 and the accelerator has been removed to make room for the LHC.
LHC: The Large Hadron Collider, a new international 14 TeV proton-proton accelerator built at CERN, to begin operations in 2007.
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LIL: The Linear Injector for LEP at CERN. LEP ended its run in 2000.
Muon Collider: No acronym. Possible future accelerator, now under study in the US and at CERN.
NLC: Next Linear Collider, now under study.
A possible future electron-positron linear accelerator,
proposed by SLAC to be built with international
participation.
NLCTA: The Next Linear Collider
Test Accelerator at SLAC.
PEP: SLAC's Positron Electron Project, now upgraded to PEP-II, the
site of the B Factory.
PEP-II: The official name for the SLAC B Factory.
PS: CERN's Proton Synchrotron.
RHIC: Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
began operation in 2000. RHIC collides beams of gold ions to study what the
universe looked like in the first few moments after its creation.
SBLC: S-Band Linear Collider. Possible future
linear collider, under study at DESY.
SLC: Stanford Linear Collider. This electron-positron collider completed data taking in 1998.
SPEAR3: SPEAR, the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring, was completed in 1965. Now upgraded to SPEAR3, it is used as a synchrotron light source for SSRL.
SPS: CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron.
TESLA: TeV-Energy Superconducting Linear Accelerator, a possible future linear collider,
now under study at DESY.
Tevatron: Fermilab's 2-TeV proton-antiproton accelerator, the world's highest-energy proton-antiproton accelerator.
TTF: TESLA Test Facility at DESY.
VEPP-4M: An electron-positron collider at BINP to study Psi and Upsilon mesons. ("VEPP" stands for "colliding electron-positron beams" in Russian.)
VEPP-2M: An elctron-positron collider at BINP to study resonant production of lightest quarkonia; currently being upgraded to become VEPP-2000.
VLHC: Very Large Hadron Collider, possible new accelerator now under study as an international follow-up to the LHC.
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Detectors & Experiments |
ALEPH: Apparatus for LEP PHysics, at CERN (Data taking completed in 2000).
ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment, destined for the LHC at CERN.
AMANDA: Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array. Operational since 1997 and now upgraded to AMANDA-II, detects high-energy cosmic neutrinos at the South Pole.
AMS: Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. A detector
in space to search for antimatter.
ANTARES: Astronomy with a Neutrino
Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch.
APEX: AntiProton Experiment. Fermilab experiment to search for antiproton decay.
ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS. Detector now being built by an international collaboration for operation at the LHC at CERN. U.S. HEP community plays a major role.
BaBar: B-Bbar (anti-B) detector at SLAC's B Factory. Named for the elephant in Laurent DeBrunhoff's children's books.
BELLE: B detector at KEK in Japan.
BES: BEijing Spectrometer
BLAST: The Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer Toroid, located at MIT.
BOREX: (or Borexino) An underground solar neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso in Italy.
BRAHMS: The Broad Range Hadron Magnetic Spectrometer located at Brookhaven.
BTeV: Proposed dedicated B physics experiment
at Fermilab's Tevatron.
CAT: Cherenkov Array at Themis, an imaging
telescope in France to detect very high-energy
gamma rays.
CDF: Collider Detector at Fermilab, studies
proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron.
CDMS: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search.
A Fermilab/university experiment to search for
the interaction of dark matter particles with the nuclei of silicon and germanium detectors, now
at Stanford. Will place a detector in Soudan Mine, Minnesota.
CHAOS: Canadian High Acceptance Orbit Spectrometer.
CHOOZ: An international long-baseline reactor neutrino experiment located at the CHOOZ A nuclear power station, les Ardennes, France, completed in 1999.
CHORUS: CERN Hybrid Oscillation Research Apparatus.
CKM: Charged Kaons at the Main Injector,
a proposed Fermilab experiment to measure
charged kaon decay.
CLEO:Not an acronym. Goes with CESR. Get it? Detector at Cornell's CESR accelerator.
CMD-2: Cryogenic Magnetic Detector, one of the two VEPP-2M's detectors, at BINP.
CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid. Detector now being built for CERN's LHC by international collaboration including many U.S. physicists.
CNGS: CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso,
a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment.
COBE: COsmic Background Explorer,
a satellite launched by NASA in 1989 to search
for evidence of the Big Bang. Currently in data
analysis.
COMPASS: CERN's Common Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy.
CRESST: Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers. An experiment in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory to search
for WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) dark matter using cryogenic detectors.
DAMA: Particle DArk MAtter search with
highly radiopure scintillators at Gran Sasso,
searching for WIMPs.
DELPHI: Detector with Lepton Photon and
Hadron Identification at CERN's LEP accelerator. Data taking completed in 2000.
DONUT: Direct Observation of the Nu Tau. A Fermilab fixed-target experiment to detect
direct interactions of the tau neutrino.
DZero: (named for location on the Tevatron Ring) Collider detector studies proton-antiproton collisions at Fermilab's Tevatron.
E787: Brookhaven experiment at the AGS to
study rare kaon decays.
EOS TPC: Equation of State Time Projection Chamber experiment, studying heavy ion collisions at Berkeley.
EXO: Enriched Xenon Observatory, searching
for neutrinoless double beta-decay at WIPP.
FOCUS: FOtoproduction of Charm: Upgraded Spectrometer. A Fermilab fixed target experiment to study charm physics.
GALLEX: The Gallium EXperiment at Gran Sasso. An international collaboration used a gallium detector at Gran Sasso, Italy to measure the solar neutrino flux produced inside the sun by proton-proton fusion (concluded in 1997).
GENIUS: Germanium Nitrogen Underground Setup, a proposed experiment by Gran Sasso and Heidelberg to operate Ge detectors in liquid nitrogen.
GLAST: Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope.
A proposed orbiting telescope for high-energy gamma rays.
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GNO: Gallium Neutrino Observatory,
the successor to GALLEX.
H1: Collider experiment at DESY.
HADES: High Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer, at GSI.
HAPPEX: Hall A Proton Parity Experiment at JLAB.
HDMS: Heidelberg Dark Matter Search.
Double beta decay and dark matter searches
taking place at the University of Heidelberg in
Germany.
HEAT: High- Energy Antimatter Telescope. A NASA-supported program of high-altitude balloon-borne experiments to study antimatter in the primary cosmic radiation.
HERA-B: Fixed-target experiment at DESY,
to investigate CP violation in the B meson.
HERMES: DESY fixed-target experiment to
explore spin.
Hi Res Fly's Eye: High-energy cosmic ray
experiment in Dugway, Utah.
HOMESTAKE: A solar neutrino experiment in
the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota.
HYPER-CP: A Search for Direct CP Violation in Hyperon decays. Fermilab fixed-target experiment.
ICARUS: Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signal. Neutrino experiment proposed at CERN/Gran Sasso.
IGEX: International Germanium Experiment in Spain.
IMB: Irvine, Michigan and Brookhaven, a collaboration looking for neutrinoless double beta decay.
K2K: KEK to Kamioka. Long-baseline neutrino experiment using a beam from KEK accelerator to Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.
KAMIOKANDE: A solar neutrino experiment at
the Kamioka Observatory in Japan.
KAMLAND: KAmioka Liquid Scintillator
Anti-Neutrino Detector, under construction in
Japan.
KARMEN: Karlsruhe-Rutherford Medium-Energy Neutrino Experiment. A neutrino interaction experiment using a detector at the ISIS spallation neutron source at Rutherford- Appleton Laboratory in England.
KATRIN: KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino
experiment at FZK to measure neutrino mass.
KEDR: Not an acronym. A universal magnetic detector for Upsilon and Psi physics at BINP's VEPP-4M.
KLOE: K LOng Experiment, to study CP violation
at LNF's DAFNE.
KOPIO: A Klong decay experiment at
Brookhaven.
KTeV: Kaons at the Tevatron, a Fermilab fixed-target experiment to study CP violation in kaon decay.
L3: named for its location on CERN's LEP accelerator. LEP completed its run in 2000.
LAND:Large Area Neutron Detector, at GSI.
LENS: Low Energy Neutrino Spectroscopy, at Heidelberg.
LHC-B: Large Hadron Collider Beauty Experiment,
being built at the LHC at CERN.
LSND: Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector.
Neutrino oscillation experiment at Los Alamos.
LUNA: Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics at Gran Sasso.
LVD: Gran Sasso’s Large Volume Detector,
looking for neutrino bursts from stellar collapses.
MACHO: Massive Compact Halo Objects. The MACHO project is a mainly U.S. collaboration testing the hypothesis that dark matter is made up mostly of MACHOs like brown dwarfs and planets.
MICE: Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment. Approved at RAL,
the goal is to realize ionization cooling in practice by showing
they can design, engineer, build and measure in a beam a cooling
channel capable of giving the desired performance for a neutrino
factory.
MUNU: An experiment at the Bugey reactor in France studying electron - electron neutrino scattering.
Majorana: Not an acronym. Adouble
beta decay experiment taking place at the
DOE’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory.
MECO: Muon to Electron COnversion,
an RSVP experiment at Brookhaven’s AGS.
MILAGRO: Detector to study cosmic ray air showers in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos, New Mexico.
MiniBooNE: Booster Neutrino Experiment,
petite size. Experiment studying neutrino oscillations using Fermilab's Booster accelerator.
MINIMAX/ T-864: A search for
disoriented chiral condensates at Fermilab.
MINOS: Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. An experiment to study neutrino oscillations using the NuMI beam from Fermilab's Main Injector accelerator.
MIPP: Main Injector Particle Production Experiment at Fermilab.
MONOLITH: Massive Observatory
for Neutrino Oscillations or LImits on THeir
existence. Atmospheric neutrino detector
at Gran Sasso.
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MPS: The Microdrop Particle Search at
SLAC, searching for extremely massive charged
particles.
MUCOOL: MUon COOLing experiment,
which hopes to develop a muon ionization
cooling channel for a high-luminosity muon
collider.
NESTOR: Neutrino Extended Submarine Telescope with Oceanographic Research, a deep sea high-energy neutrino telescope off the coast of Greece.
NOE: Neutrino Oscillation Experiment,
at Gran Sasso.
NOMAD: Neutrino Oscillation MAgnetic Detector,
at CERN, dismantled in 1999.
NuMI: Neutrinos at the Main Injector, a project to send a beam of high-energy neutrinos from Fermilab to a detector in northern Minnesota, beginning in 2002.
NuSEA: NUcleon SEA. Fermilab fixed target experiment to measure the asymmetry of down
and up anti-quarks in the nucleon sea (completed).
NuTeV: Neutrinos at the Tevatron, a Fermilab
fixed-target experiment using a neutrino beam for precision measurement of the mass of the W boson.
OMNIS: Observatory for Multiflavor
Neutrinos from Supernovae, an underground
experiment at WIPP.
OPAL: Omni Purpose Apparatus for LEP, at CERN. Data taking ended in 2000.
OPERA: Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking
Apparatus, the neutrino detector at
Gran Sasso for the long-baseline experiment
CNGS.
ORLaND: Oak Ridge Large Neutrino
Detector, proposed to search for neutrino oscillations at
Oak Ridge.
PHENIX: Pioneering High-Energy Nuclear
Interaction eXperiment, at Brookhaven.
PHOBOS: Not an acronym. Phobos is
a moon of Mars, which was the name of the
original proposed detector. Studies heavy-ion
collisions at Brookhaven.
Pierre Auger Observatory: (No acronym) International experiment to track down the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
pp2pp: proton-proton to proton-proton
elastic scattering experiment at Brookhaven.
RAND:Radio Neutrino Detector array, located 1.5 km from the South Pole.
SAGE: Soviet-American Gallium Experiment. (Although "Soviet" changed to "Russian" a few years back, "RAGE" didn't have the right ring.) A solar neutrino detector in the Baksan Mountains of Russia.
SDSS: Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Astrophysics project to create largest-ever three-dimensional map of the sky.
SELEX: SEgmented Large X baryon spectrometer EXperiment A fixed target experiment at Fermilab
to study charm baryons.
SLD: SLAC Large Detector, optimized for physics
at the SLC interaction point (Data taking now completed).
SNAP: SuperNova Acceleration Probe, a proposed satellite to measure the Universe's rate of expansion.
SND: Spherical Neutral Detector, the other of the two VEPP-2M's detectors at BINP.
SNO: Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. A solar-neutrino detector near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
SOUDAN II: Soudan II underground detector, in an underground laboratory in the Tower-Soudan Iron Mine in Soudan, Minnesota, to search for nucleon decay and study atmospheric neutrino physics.
SPY: Secondary Particle Yield, a CERN experiment to measure the production rates of pions and kaons.
STAR: Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC, looking
for quark-gluon plasma at Brookhaven.
Super-K: Super-Kamiokande experiment to detect neutrino oscillations from atmospheric neutrino flux, in Japan.
TAPS: Two-Arm Photon Spectrometer,
German experiment to measure hard photons
and neutral mesons.
TISOL: TRIUMF Isotope Separator OnLine.
TOSCA: Toplological Oscillation Search with kinematic analysis, the intended CERN follow-up project to CHORUS and NOMAD.
UNO: Underground Nucleon decay and
neutrino Observatory, located at WIPP.
ZEUS: (Not an acronym, but goes with HERA) Collider experiment at DESY's HERA.
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Other
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AIP: American Institute of Physics. Publishes
Physics Today.
APS: American Physical Society. Publishes
physics journals, organizes meetings and
conferences, communicates to policymakers
and the public.
CNRS: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France’s equivalent to the NSF.
DOE: U.S. Department of Energy. Funds the
lion's share of U.S. HEP.
HENP: DOE's Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics.
HEP: DOE's Division of High Energy Physics, part of HENP.
HEPAP: High Energy Physics Advisory Panel.
Advisory to DOE.
HEPIC: High Energy Physics Information
Center, a clearinghouse of HEP info.
IN2P3: Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules, the division of CNRS that oversees nuclear and particle physics
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INFN: Italy's Institute Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, which operates physics laboratories throughout the country. Headquartered in Rome.
NSF: National Science Foundation. Funds university physics research, physics experiments and projects, and an HEP lab at Cornell University.
OSTP: Office of Science and Technology
Policy. Advises the President.
PRL: Physical Review Letters, the main
journal of the APS.
SAGENAP: Scientific Assessment Group for Experiments in Non-Accelerator Physics. Advisory to DOE.
SC: DOE's Office of Science
SPIRES: Stanford Public Information REtrieval System. Online gold mine of physics information.
URA: Universities Research Association.
Contracts with DOE to run Fermilab.
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Other Acronym Resources
SLACspeak - SLAC's glossary of high-energy physics acronyms
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