My field of research is experimental particle physics, a field that strives to elucidate the most fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, even probing the nature of space and time. The activities of the UMass experimental particle physics group are described at this web site.
I am currently involved in the ATLAS experiment located at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. ATLAS started taking data at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in late 2009. The LHC collides proton beams with an energy of 13 TeV and opens up a totally new energy frontier. This leap into uncharted territory allows us to tackle many important questions including some of Nature’s most puzzling mysteries: the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, the unification of fundamental interactions, the search for extra dimensions, and more.
My past and current activities on ATLAS are as follows:
- Physics Coordinator for ATLAS.
- Chair of the ATLAS Publications Committee.
- Convener of the ATLAS Exotics physics group.
- Software development and reconstruction for the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer.
- Evaluation of combined muon reconstruction performance for physics analysis with an emphasis on muons at the highest transverse momenta ever produced at a collider.
- Search for new phenomena in events containing muons. In particular, search for fermion compositeness via contact interactions and search for large extra spatial dimensions.
- Search for di-Higgs resonances in the 4b channel, sensitive to extended Higgs sector models and warped extra dimension models.