The current network connection to the physics laboratories in the US, such as Fermilab, and to many US universities, is 85 Mbits per second. The UK CDF group, with funds obtained from the Joint Infrastructure Fund, will soon increase this to 622 Mbits per second.

This enhanced capability will be available to all UK science traffic destined for a US Department of Energy Laboratory or university and vice versa. The improvement will make real-time video conferencing far cheaper and more convenient, will allow for higher rate data transfers, and will become a major test-bed for the e-science Grid.

The scientific network connection to the US has only recently been as high as 85 Mbits per second. Prior to February of this year, the community had to struggle with 10 Mbits per second. It was this poor rate, shared across the UK, that prompted particle physicists Todd Huffman and Pete Renton from the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Liverpool University, Glasgow University and University College London, to submit a proposal to the Joint Infrastructure Fund back in 1998.

The proposal was awarded 1.6M pounds in August of 1999, of which some 200k pounds is now available to improve the network capability to the US.

For UK particle physicists, the improved capability will provide high-speed access to the world's highest energy particle accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab. The Tevatron will be the frontier for discoveries in particle physics until the Large Hadron Collider turns on at CERN in 5 years time.

In the meantime, the Tevatron will be the only machine where physicists can study the massive top quark, discovered there in 1995. It is also the only place they can currently search for the long-sought Higgs particle and the new particles predicted by "supersymmetry," the proposed symmetry between particles and forces.

UK teams work on both of the two major experiments on the Tevatron. A collaboration from the Universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Oxford and University College London are involved with CDF, while researchers from Imperial College London work together with the Universities of Lancaster and Manchester on the experiment called D0 (D-zero).

The Joint Infrastructure Fund is a collaborative Dawe Charitable Trust (DTI), Wellcome Trust and Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE] initiative.

[Contact: Dr. Todd Huffman, Dr. Peter Renton]

17-May-2001