Using the Higgs Boson to Probe and Test the Standard Model at ATLAS

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This award will provide support for a group with one PI, a postdoc and two graduate students to work on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is a large, complex machine that accelerates protons to unprecedented energies, allowing for discovery of elementary particles more massive than any yet observed. One of the LHC's primary objectives was to find the Higgs Boson, the last particle in the historically successful "Standard Model" (SM) that accounts for much of the interactions of particles forming the visible matter in the universe. Though doubts linger, many physicists believe the new particle is the Higgs Boson long predicted by the SM. Nevertheless, more careful measurements of its rarer decay modes need to be made. Surprises are possible, and could result from effects beyond the SM that are yet to be discovered. This project will focus on efforts to do this by looking at events that pair a Higgs boson with another particle. Searches for extremely rare processes as will be sought in this effort require the use of sophisticated software and computing tools, modern machine learning techniques, data mining and the use of complex statistical tool kits. These skills are useful not only in particle physics and other STEM fields, but also outside of academia and the research world as companies, non-profits and governmental organizations across the country look to the large data sets newly available from social media and computing databases to provide better products and more useful services to customers andcitizens.The proposal supports work to be done in Run2. This is about to begin at the full energy potential of the LHC of 13 TeV, almost twice that in Run1 and twice the energy ever studied with precision before. This group will focus on events with a Higgs Boson accompanied by either a t quark, a t-tbar pair or another Higgs. The PI has expertise in such analyses in Run1 that may allow him some advantage in dealing with different conditions likely to occur in Run2. The group will be working on the ATLAS fast tracker (FTK) that will allow new triggers that might allow the events of interest to be found more efficiently.