CAREER:Two Higgs are Better than One: Investigating Electroweak Symmetry Breaking at the LHC and Beyond with Real-Time Charged Particle Reconstruction

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a Career Award for the PI, a new assistant professor at Stanford U, to work 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 the primary objectives of the LHC at the time of construction 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 visible matter in the universe. The search for the Higgs Boson was successful, so the discovery of the particles that lie within the realm of particle physics physics beyond the SM is now the goal. This award is for work that could lead to such a discovery by filtering out events with two Higgs Bosons in them. Principal Investigator Lauren Tompkins is starting a new experimental high energy physics group at Stanford University which will pursue a number of software algorithms that, working with a new real time hardware track reconstruction module (the FTK), will lead to a greatly enriched sample of Higgs pair candidates. She will take primary roles within the collaboration to carry this out. The group will support a vigorous and carefully planned broader impact program through courses for Stanford students and also outreach to local schools. One of the principal aims is to increase enrollment in physics. She will also mentor under-privileged students from Cal State institutions during summer break. These students will obtain hands-on experience with both hardware and software.