Measurement of charged particle trajectories is ubiquitous in applications of physics to a wide variety of areas and is essential for making measurements in high energy particle physics experiments. Silicon sensors are good for measurement of charged particles due to their resistance to radiation, high spatial granularity across large array areas, as well as their ability to collect data at...
The tracking detectors at the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider will require a dielectric capable of withstanding the high voltage that will be applied across their silicon sensors to maintain efficiency. Dielectrics are currently being studied using experimental device configurations which are electrostatically analogous to the LHC trackers to determine the most effective material to...
Deep Learning is making revolutionary advancements in the field of artificial intelligence and computer vision (CV). Recently successful applications of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a type of Deep Learning (DL) algorithm, include analyzing data recorded by liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs), a class of particle imaging detectors that can record the trajectory of charged...
We present an ongoing analysis of an experiment measuring the scintillation response linearity of high pressure helium-4 gas to nuclear recoils using a commercial fast neutron detector. The Arktis Fast Neutron Detector S670 is a tube filled with high pressure natural helium gas and several silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) light detectors, which collect scintillation light produced by particle...
The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) proposes a high-statistics search for low-mass dark matter in fixed-target electron-nucleus collisions. Ultimately, LDMX will explore thermal relic dark matter over most of the viable sub-GeV mass range to a decisive level of sensitivity. To achieve this goal, LDMX employs the missing momentum technique, where electrons scattering in a thin target can...
Much work has already been done developing a compact fast neutron camera for field deployment. However, mobility of the current designs are limited in part by the inclusion of large photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). Replacement of PMTs with silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) coupled to a crystal scintillator promises a reduction in size and power, and thus an increase in mobility of current systems....
A study of the decays $B^0_s→μ^+μ^−$ and $B^0→μ^+μ^−$ has been performed using 26.3$~$fb$^{−1}$ of 13 TeV LHC proton-proton collisions collected with the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016. For $B^0_s$, the branching fraction $BR(B^0_s→μ^+μ^−)=(3.2^{+1.1}_{−1.0})×10^{−9}$ is measured. For the $B^0$, an upper limit on the branching fraction is set at $BR(B^0→μ^+μ^−)<4.3×10^{−10}$ at 95 confidence...
After the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 a major goal for Higgs physics is the more precise measurement of its couplings, especially that of its dominant but largely unconstrained decay to bb. Beyond the importance of this measurement to our understanding of the SM, these constraints also serve as a probe of new physics beyond the SM. This year the ATLAS collaboration leveraged the...
Energy reconstruction of neutrino interactions in long-baseline experiments is heavily driven by the kinematics of leptons produced in charged-current interactions. Accurate reconstruction often relies on selecting charged-current quasi-elastic (CCQE) events, containing no particles other than the nuclear recoil and the produced lepton, while rejecting inelastic events mimicking a CCQE...
The IceCube observatory located at the South Pole detects high energy neutrino's from atmospheric and astrophysics sources. Neutrinos are weakly interacting particles but at high energies neutrinos will be absorbed while traveling through the Earth. The Earth absorption can be used to fit for the neutrino cross section at TeV energies, well above accelerator measurements. A previous study...
Recent LHC searches have probed decays of the H(125) involving new light pseudoscalar bosons (a). For example, a current CMS search probes H->aa->mu mu tau tau for m(a) < 21 GeV. Because of the large mass difference between the H and the light pseudoscalar, the two taus are boosted and collimated. To improve signal acceptance for future studies, we explore the use of machine learning...
We present a search for the pair production of a vector-like, charge 2/3e quark “T”, in the all-hadronic final state. Proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV are analyzed using 35.9 fb−1 of data collected by the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider during 2016 collisions. We utilize boosted substructure techniques, including N-subjettiness and soft drop mass to identify vector boson...
Theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics predict increased production of two Higgs bosons (HH). Searches for HH production often involve hadronic final states that deal with large backgrounds. Recently, there has been an increase in new jet substructure techniques that utilize machine learning algorithms. These algorithms may be able improve the signal to noise ratio in HH...
Jet reclustering method is a novel tool to reconstruct large-radius jet. This study implements jet reclustering procedure in the search for dark matter production associated with Higgs-like scalar boson decaying to $ W^+ W^- $ at ATLAS, also known as Mono-S(WW) signature. The performance of reconstructing four highly-boosted jets in the signal sample is inspected, and a better result in mass...
This study focuses on the statistical analysis of the ongoing $t\bar{t}$ resonance search at ATLAS, which aims at searching for new heavy particles decaying to a top quark pair in fully hadronic final state with full Run 2 data. In this study, BumpHunter is employed to search for deviation from a smoothly falling background prediction, while Frequentist CLs method is used to set upper limit...
