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Welcome to the UT High Energy Physics group!

HEP group photo

We study elementary particles at very high energies with the Compact Muon Solenoid detector (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and from the electron-positron collider at the Stanford Accelerator Center (SLAC), Stanford, California, to address questions such as:

  • Where do particles get their mass from?
  • Why is there matter, but no anti-matter in the Universe?
  • What is the nature of Dark Matter?
  • Can all forces in nature be unified?
  • Are there extra dimensions?

... and many more.

Our group consists of 1 faculty, 2 post docs, 4 graduate students with research participation of undergraduate students.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN started operation in Fall 2009. From proton-proton collisions at very high energies (several TeV) we want to learn about the existence of new particles that might change our picture of physics profoundly. Many new results will be obtained already within the first year. The BaBar experiment at SLAC collected an unprecedented amount of data and we are finding new particles every year.

Students in our group analyze data from the LHC to reconstruct certain particle processes that potentially produce the so called Higgs boson that might be responsible to generate mass for particles, and B mesons that can help to understand the matter-anti-matter asymmetry of the Universe, or look for completely unknown particles and their signatures. Computers are the main tool for the analyses. Graduate students learn about and apply different particle detection techniques and statistical analysis methods developing smart algorithms.

Our group participates in the commissioning and operation of the silicon pixel detector that has an unprecedented amount of individual readout channels (about 66 million). Most of the data processing occurs right at the detector near the collision point. The new technique and he extreme conditions require many systematic studies to get the instrument operational at its best.

Here at the University we have a detector research laboratory. We study, build and install a pixel detector that is based on diamonds. Pursuing a PhD in our group gives the opportunity to be part of diamond detector research, detector installation and commissioning at CERN and to perform data analysis with high performance computers. We plan to install the largest Diamond pixel detector ever built by spring 2012 in the CMS detector. It will measure the overall proton-proton interaction rate which is fundamental input for many measurements with CMS.