Explorations in High Energy Physics at the Large Hadron Collider with the ATLAS Experiment

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This project is devoted to research using ATLAS, a multi-purpose particle physics detector situated around the 27 km ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the project is to explore the fundamental nature of the universe in order to understand its evolution from the hot, dense soup of energy and matter existing soon after the Big Bang to the cool, diffuse universe we see today. The interactions and evolution of the fundamental constituents of the universe are well described by the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics that has been very successful in predicting the behavior of nature in the currently available energy regimes. The LHC is expected to restart operations in 2015 after a two-year upgrade program that allows the proton-proton collisions to reach an energy of 13 Tera-electron-Volt, almost twice the highest energy yet produced in any human-made device. This energy regime will allow for further understanding of the SM, exploration of the properties of the newly discovered Higgs Boson and the search for undiscovered particles and phenomena not described by the SM, yet believed to exist. In this research project Professor Moss and his group at California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State) will probe the electroweak sector of the SM using data collected ATLAS to test the SM at the new energy regime and to search for new phenomena. They propose to study couplings of Higgs Bosons to the electro-weak Z Bosons. Moss and his group, along with their colleagues in ATLAS will perform studies to optimize the performance of the ATLAS Pixel Detector and Diamond Beam Monitor and develop software and user interfaces for the supervisory controls and data acquisition of the ATLAS Detector.