Publié le 27-05-2005

In the week of June 23th, the University of AbdelMalek Essaadi has organized its annual week of science ?la semaine de la science? in collaboration with several institutions and associations. The association MASTeR took part in this remarkable event and was represented by its representative in Morocco M. C. El Amrani and the administration council member M. O. Bouhali.

This latter was invited to give a review talk about recent progress in high energy physics. In what follows we present an outline of his talk.

High Energy Physics aims at understanding and describing the structure of matter and the way it interacts. To investigate the underlying structure of matter it is necessary to build powerful colliders and to have a probe (detector) of sufficient resolution.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been proposed to answer or to shed light on several questions in the field of particle physics. It is a proton-proton accelerator which will be installed in the 27 km circumference tunnel at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN, in Geneva. Proton beams will be accelerated in opposite directions and will be brought to collide. The beam energy will be 7 TeV in order to reach 1 TeV in the centre of mass at the proton constituent scale.

Four detectors will be placed in the four interaction points along the proton beam pipe. The CMS detector was presented in more details as an example.

Besides the technical challenge the LHC is facing, the computing power needed as well as the storage resources has no precedence. Tens of PetaByte of data will be produced, stored and processed every year. Data should also be accessible worldwide. The ideal solution for such a challenge is the grid computing. It is an innovative approach aiming at using computing resources available in different places as a single computing system. It provides scalable, secure and high performance mechanisms for finding and negotiating access to remote resources.