Research

My research is focused on the search for new phenomena in proton-proton collisions at the LHC accelerator using the ATLAS detector. Together with students and post-docs, I am currently investigating unusual decay of Higgs bosons, the possible production of quantum black holes and possible particles that can serve as mediators between dark matter particles and quarks in the early universe.

I have a special interest in the ATLAS trigger. At the end of LHC Run 1 (2012) the proton beams were sufficiently intense to produce almost a billion collisions per second. During Run 2 (2015-2018) the LHC has produced as many 1.6 billion collisions per second. The job of the trigger is to select about one thousand events per second that are saved for further analysis. In the future we expect as many 6 billion collisions per second making the task of triggering even more difficult.

I also have an ongoing interest in detector development for future energy frontier accelerators, such as a linear collider (LC).

Below are links to talks and paper related to my current research interests:

General ATLAS

  • ATLAS Status Report to the LHCC, 7. Dec 2011.
  • The ATLAS Detector Paper

    ATLAS Trigger

  • A description of the ATLAS trigger in Run 1 ( 2010 - 2012) can be found on arXiv at 1110.1530 .
  • A description of the ATLAS trigger in Run 2 (2015 and onward) can be found on arXiv at 1611.09661
  • More recent techinical public plots of trigger performance can be found here.

    Recent ATLAS results

  • Public recent ATLAS results are found here.

    Detector Developement for a Linear Collider

  • Aspects of detector design for a linear collider (2007) talk