Carleton’s Physics Department has traditionally been a hub of Big Data research. What makes Carleton researchers unique is not only their strengths in using large data sets but also their strengths in advancing knowledge transfer through the formation of networks and other partnerships. One example of this type of collaboration is the Ottawa Medical Physics Institute (OMPI), a Carleton University Research Network consisting of close to 30 members from several institutes in the Ottawa region, including Canada Research Chairs, Dave Rogers and Rowan Thomson. The medical physics community in Ottawa has one of the most diverse spectra of research and service activities in Canada. The OMPI has been successfully tapping into this rich community of expertise for more than 20 years. Along with coordinating and delivering graduate programs in medical physics, OMPI researchers are making strides in areas as diverse as quantitative MRIs for brain perfusion, Monte Carlo systems and simulations, health physics studies in the Arctic, benchmark data for electron and photon beams, and photon attenuation data and coherent scatter form factors. It is a testament to the effectiveness and relevance of Carleton’s OMPI that it continues to attract new members.
Carleton physics researchers are also involved with international colleagues through the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, an experiment so ground-breaking that it brings experimental physics into completely new territory, leading to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Carleton researchers also played a key role in creating Canada’s SNOLAB, the deepest, cleanest underground lab in the world. With the support of colleagues across the country, our researchers are advancing discoveries in the areas of dark matter, supernova detection and observation, and attempting to measure the mass of neutrinos.