To the editor:

We are pleased that the staff of the Daily Campus is interested in the research that our faculty and students in the Department of Physics are doing in connection with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project and the associated ATLAS detector in Geneva, Switzerland. Our ongoing work may help solve some of the great mysteries of the universe – but JFK’s murder is not one of them.

When talking to a Daily Campus writer, we wanted to communicate that the work our students are associated with can have surprising consequences. We mentioned that a former SMU graduate student, Vitaliy Fadeyev, was working at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory several years ago when he developed an unusual application for sound recording preservation and analysis that the National Archives thought could be used for analysis of a recording made in the moments JFK was shot. Vitaliy was working on the ATLAS detector for the Berkeley Lab at the time, and saw some parallels between that work and sound scanning of old recordings.

The headline in your Oct. 2 story leads one to believe the SMU Physics Department may have solved JFK’s murder. We have not. The story further implies that SMU’s ongoing work on the LHC project and the ATLAS detector may help with analyzing more details about the day the president was shot. This is a leap of logic that we did not communicate to the reporter.

The real work we are doing in particle physics is intensely important, and we are honored to be a part of the very exciting LHC project.

Sincerely,

Fredrick Olness, Professor SMU Physics

Jingbo Ye, Assistant Professor SMU Physics