Searches for New Phenomena with High Energy Particle Colliders

Northern Illinois University, Dekalb IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The award will fund Northern Illinois University (NIU) group in their research activities in the D0 experiment at FNAL, the ATLAS experiment at CERN, detector development (CALICE), as well as sustaining an extensive outreach program. The research program in D0 involves the search for associated production of Standard Model Higgs with the Z, top decays, charged Higgs and lepto-quark searches. As part of the search the group will continue to develop the muon and tau identification which are crucial for the selection of the channels of interest and for the rejection of background events. This program will continue the Tevatron is closed and the data analysis has been completed. The ATLAS experiment research program at CERN of this group has started and this proposal will is fund their investigation in to the properties of top production and decays, inclusive photon production at the LHC. These channels will also be used to improve the understanding of the detector performance. Once the detector performance is understood and sufficient integrated luminosity has been collected the research program will aims to search for neutral and changed Higgs. Looking into the more distant future the group is working on developing calorimetry for the International Linear collider. The effort concentrated on the tail-catcher and muon tracker behind the calorimeter. The detector consists of small (high granularity) scintillator element readouts by small solid state photodetectors (Si-PMTs). The push towards higher granularity in ILC calorimetry is a consequence of the particle-flow algorithm attempt to identify the electromagnetic components of the shower at all its stages. The broader interest areas the NIU group will continue an active outreach program that includes: school visits, physics Olympics, summer camps, QuarkNet, Halloween Haunted Physics Lab, etc. The university has a STEM outreach coordinator and several REU students moved on to graduate programs in physics and other sciences. In addition the group is involved in new initiatives to train personnel for the proton therapy center.