Elementary Particle Physics with Collider Experiments

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This award will fund work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). During the three-year period of this project CMS will be collecting data from proton-proton collisions at the highest collision energy ever attained in a man-made accelerator, 13 trillion electron-volts. Using its prior CMS data analysis experience, the KU group intends to use this new data to search for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model that describes the elementary particles known to date and explore the subatomic forces that interact with these elementary particles. The group also does significant work on public outreach efforts. Its most unique outreach project is Quarked!TM Adventures in the Subatomic Universe, a multimedia project aimed at students age seven and up. Content from this project can be found online at www.quarked.org. This grant will also provide for the training of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the essential skills of the field. The group also has a strong record of success in mentoring undergraduate researchers. The group's broader educational mission includes communicating about science with the general public through public talks and other means. The intellectual merit of the research program comes from increasing our basic understanding of matter and energy at the smallest experimentally accessible distance scales. The discovery at the LHC of the Higgs boson with a mass around 125 GeV opened up fascinating opportunities for investigations at the current LHC energy of 13 TeV. The KU data analysis efforts will focus on exploiting the Higgs boson as a tool for discovery. The group is currently using a data set that was collected in 2015 to search for electroweak production of a vector-like quark decaying to a top quark and a Higgs boson using boosted topologies in the all-hadronic final state. Extensions of this work, funded by this award, will explore data taken in 2016 and thereafter and include other production and decay modes of vector-like quarks. One of the two X-ray test centers for the Phase I forward pixel detector for the phase-I upgrade of the CMS detector is located at KU. Here, the group tests the modules to assure that the bump bonding was successful, the energy calibration works, and that the module is operational under high rates. KU also hosts a full electronics test chain system with a goal to assure that the system works and that the bit error rate is low for the full system. Once the Phase I FPIX detector is shipped to CERN, this group has committed to help commission the system there.For the pixel tracker for the planned High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade, the U.S. groups are committed to building the forward pixel system. This system will extend track reconstruction to high pseudo rapidity (up to 4.0) and will ensure good missing energy resolution that plays a critical role in many searches for new physics. The KU group is involved in Monte Carlo studies for the design of the HL-LHC forward pixel detector and is working with groups from the U. Nebraska-Lincoln and Paul Scherrer Institute on studies of small pixels. KU plans to contribute to the electronics and module testing design and construction.