Experimental Particle Physics Research at SUNY Albany

Suny At Albany, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide support for a group with one PI, a postdoc and a student to work on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is a large, complex machine that accelerates protons to unprecedented energies, allowing for discovery of elementary particles more massive than any yet observed. One of the LHC's recent discoveries was to find a candidate for the Higgs Boson, the last particle in the historically successful "Standard Model" (SM) that accounts with amazing accuracy for the observed interactions of particles forming the visible matter in the universe. The next step is to capitalize on the LHC to look for evidence for physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) to address difficulties known to exist in the SM. This group will continue to work on the ATLAS experiment to look for decays of the Higgs particle as the LHC begins operations at twice the energy ever studied before. The PI will continue to communicate the excitement that the Higgs discovery generated as a means of attracting students into the study of science through such activities as giving lectures on Physics at the LHC to high school students in Albany and the Honors College students at the university, organizing and holding Q&A sessions after the screening of the movie "Particle Fever" in local area theaters, and participating in the online "Adopt-a-Physicist" program run by the American Physical Society. The LHC has completed one successful run. During this, a candidate for the Higgs Boson was found, a major triumph. Though doubts linger, many physicists believe the new particle is the Higgs Boson long predicted by the SM. Nevertheless, more careful measurements of its rarer decay modes need to be made. Surprises are possible, and could result from BSM effects. Also, there could be more than one Higgs particle. This group has expertise in analysis of the properties of Higgs decays. The group will continue to work on the ATLAS experiment through Run2. Analyses will focus on decays of the Higgs particle revealed in Run1 to t-tbar quark jet pairs. The group will continue to improve and expand the software tools. They will also study layout designs for the inner Silicon tracker, part of the ATLAS high luminosity upgrade. These layouts will aim to maximize the efficiency for finding and reconstructing charged tracks in the challenging ATLAS upgrade environment.