Measurement of the Higgs Sector Through Decays to B-quarks

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This award will provide support to a Stony Brook University group working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC machine and ATLAS, a large particle detector facility, were built as basic science tools using funds from NSF and other agencies around the world. One of their primary objectives was to find the Higgs Boson, the last particle in the historically successful "Standard Model" (SM) that accounts for so much of the existence of, and forces between, known particles forming the matter in the universe. This effort has been successful. The next step in the experiments is to study the properties and characteristics of this newly discovered particle as a laboratory to see if it behaves as the SM predicts or if there are deviations suggesting evidence for new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that might, for instance, account for the presence of the mysterious "Dark Matter" that makes up so much of the mass of the universe. The LHC is currently in the midst of Run 2, at almost twice the energy explored earlier and with significantly increased event samples. It is possible that evidence for BSM physics could emerge at this higher energy and with the higher event statistics from the current run and by means of further upgrades of the LHC and ATLAS to follow.Analytically, to facilitate a detailed study of the Higgs Boson and search for other new states of matter, the Stony Brook group will be studying final states containing b-quark jets, with focus on advancing the identification of b-jets with ever high transverse momentum. On the technical side, the group is engaged in the Phase II upgrade of the ATLAS inner tracker, called the ITK, for the high luminosity LHC. The work concentrates on two areas: simulation studies of the b-tagging performance for high transverse momentum jets with the upgraded detector, and development of the data acquisition system for the ITK strip detector. Through this work, the Stony Brook group's broader impacts efforts include development of state-of-the-art software and computing tools, and the direct participation of undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers in cutting edge scientific research and instrumentation development. Such efforts help to lay the groundwork for future innovations in other areas, and for general economic development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.