Courses:
Falls: C1403 Introduction to Classical and Quantum Waves, G6050 Particle Physics Phenomenology
Research:
I spend most of my time working on
experiments built and operated by very large collaborations of
physicists to study the products of very
high energy proton-(anti)proton interactions. My main
interest lies in the search for direct evidence of new physics, through
the discovery of new particles or interactions. I participate in
two experiments: D0 at Fermilab's Tevatron (near Chicago,
USA), and ATLAS at CERN's LHC (in Geneva, Switzerland).
D0 specifics: I joined D0 in
1998, during the construction of Run II which started in 2001.
The accelerator is now running very well and we have multiple inverse
femtobarns of data to analyze. This represents over a billion
events. I contribute to
D0 in many ways:
- Searches for New Physics,
lately focussed on the Higgs boson
- Chair of the internal review
board vetting Bs mixing analyses (D0 made the first
ever measurement of the oscillation frequency)
- Development and maintenance
of interfaces between the D0 software framework and the Monte-Carlo
event generators pythia, herwig and alpgen
- Development and maintenance
of the Level 3 trigger filter farm
- Development and maintenance
of the data acquisition system
- Shifts (the detector nearly
runs itself, but not quite)
- In the past, I was convener
of the New Phenomena group and Head of Computing and Software
ATLAS
specifics: The detector is currently being
built, with data taking expected to start in 2008. The LHC opens
a new energy domain in which we have high expectation for discovery
(see for example my talk at DPF
2004). My contributions to ATLAS are:
- Studies in preparation of
searches for New Physics: I was convener of the Exotics group
in ATLAS until recently
- Construction, testing and
installation of the front-end boards for the liquid Argon calorimeter
- R&D towards readout of
the liquid Argon calorimeter in the ATLAS upgrade
- Here's a link to the activities of the Nevis
ATLAS group
GB, November 2nd, 2007