Dark Sectors and More with the ATLAS Experiment

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports 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 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. This could potentially lead to direct detection of dark matter. The award will enhance the commitment to increasing the number of students from under-represented groups in physics. This award will allow the mentoring program of under-privileged students from Cal State institutions during summer break. These students will obtain hands-on experience with both hardware and software in a modern high-energy physics experiment. This award will enable the experimental high energy physics group at Stanford University to further develop several software algorithms that will exploit the ATLAS trigger system, the global feature extractor, enhancing the ability of the ATLAS experiment to detect missing energy, a key signature of dark matter. Recent searches for dark matter have concentrated on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and have come up short. This award will allow searches for new signatures of dark matter concentrating on missing transverse energy in collision events in the ATLAS detector. 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.