Tasnim Shama wrote this in the Daily Princetonian today (in part...)
Xiaohang Quan ’09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a
miscalculation in the hardware of the world’s largest particle accelerator.
Quan, a physics concentrator, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week
with physics professors Christopher Tully GS ’98, Jim Olsen and Daniel
Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN). This year, however, they also came to discuss Quan’s
discovery with the designers of the hardware for the Compact Muon
Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which, as part of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC), has the potential to revolutionize particle physics.
In the hardware used to record and capture events in the LHC, she
discovered errors that were leading to the appearances of double images
because of particle streams known as jets.