Search for New Phenomena at the Energy Frontier

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The objective of this project is to search for physics that does not have an explanation in the Standard Model (SM), the theory that describes the properties of the elementary particles making up the known matter in the universe. The work will be done using the ATLAS multi-particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. In 2012 the Higgs boson (H) was discovered at the LHC by both ATLAS and CMS, another large detector at LHC. The Higgs boson was the last particle predicted to exist by the SM. In this project the PI and his group of scientists will use the LHC running at almost twice the energy achieved in 2012, 13 teraelectron volts (TeV) as opposed to 7.5 (TeV). The group will look for events in which an H decays to a fermion anti-fermion pair. (A fermion is an elementary particle that has a half-integer value of the fundamental property of all elementary particles known as spin. An electron, for example, is a fermion.) Details of such decays, such as the frequency with which they occur, can reveal whether or not other Higgs-like particles, predicted in various extensions of the SM, exist. The increased energy will also allow the group to search for further, more massive Higgs-like states. The award will support one PI, a postdoctoral fellow and a graduate student. The group will collect and analyze events from run II of the LHC, which begins in the summer of 2015 and continues through the end of 2017.The group will also play a role in the maintenance of the ATLAS tiled calorimeter system and the Fast TracKer trigger (FTK, part of the planned upgrade of the ATLAS detector designed to rapidly reconstruct data from the silicon-based charged particle detector system). Their analysis focus will be in the study of Higgs couplings to ff where the Fermions are from the 3rd generation (t, b, tau-nu).