Research on ATLAS

Experimental elementary particle physicists are concerned with discovering the most fundamental constituents of matter and the laws governing their behavior.

In our research, we investigate several important questions:

  • What is the origin of mass?
  • What does dark matter consist of?
  • Do Higgs bosons provide a portal to a Dark Sector?
  • Are there extra dimensions of spacetime?
  • Do supersymmetric particles exist?
  • Do all forces unify at ultra-high energy?

Located at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, the ATLAS experiment is collecting proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV in the current Run 3, scheduled to span the years 2022-2025. As we continue accumulating ever larger data samples at the highest collision energies ever recorded, we continue exploring uncharted territory to tackle many important questions including some of Nature’s most puzzling mysteries: the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, the special role of the Higgs boson, the unification of fundamental interactions, the search for extra dimensions, and more. The next major phase of the experiment will begin in 2029 with the start of data taking at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. During that phase, expected to last into the 2040’s, ATLAS will record collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and collect 10 times more data than will be available at the end of Run 3.

The UMass ATLAS group is heavily involved in software development for the Muon Spectrometer. We are leading several areas: Event data model, muon reconstruction, muon performance.

In addition, we are responsible for the Northeast Tier 2 (NET2) computer center, one of just 4 such centers for ATLAS in the US. NET2 is located at the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computer Center (MGHPCC) in nearby Holyoke, Mass.

We are also involved in hardware efforts related to the Phase I and Phase II upgrades of the muon trigger, as well as in the Phase II upgrade of the ATLAS inner detector, the Inner Tracker (ITk).

Our physics interests lie in measurements of Higgs boson properties and in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model with muon, tracking and jet signatures. We are particularly interested in exploiting the tracking and muon capabilities of ATLAS to advance those interests. Our physics analysis focus lies in the following areas:

  • Measurement of Higgs boson production in promising kinematic regions. In particular, off-shell production, high-momentum production, and associated production with a W or Z boson.
  • Searches for TeV-scale new physics in final states with high-momentum leptons, W bosons, Z bosons, or Higgs bosons
  • Searches for new light particles in the decay of Higgs bosons via a Higgs or vector portal
  • Dark sector or hidden sector searches

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