Rutgers University Department of Physics and
Astronomy
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A lively area of experimental work in the department is High Energy Physics.
This area includes both experiments studying particle physics at accelerators
and experiments studying the new area of astroparticle physics. Eight faculty
members supervise efforts involving roughly forty people (physicists, technical
and clerical staff, graduate and undergraduate students) in a wide spectrum of
elementary particle investigations. These efforts are well supported by the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the University, and
they have had considerable success in obtaining precious beam time at large
accelerator facilities. At
Professors Yuri Gershtein, Eva Halkiadakis, Amit Lath, Steve Schnetzer and Sunil Somalwar
We are members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment, one of two
large detector facilities being built for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under
construction at the CERN laboratory near
Our group at
In the area of detector hardware and construction, our group has played a
leading role in designing custom, radiation-hard, deep sub micron electronics
for the readout of the CMS pixel detector. We are currently working on an
exciting new proposal that we recently made for building a luminosity monitor
for CMS based on diamond pixel telescopes. This device will measure the
bunch-by-bunch luminosity, intensity of the collisions, to a precision of about
1% while also monitoring the location of the collision point. Both of these are
important inputs needed for many of the physics measurements. The luminosity
monitor utilizes two advanced detector developments that our group has
extensive expertise in, pixels and radiation-hard diamond sensors. We plan to
construct the luminosity monitor at
Professors Eva Halkiadakis, Amit Lath, Sunil Somalwar
The Tevatron is poised to collect enough data to either find the mechanism that breaks electroweak symmetry -- which makes the W and Z bosons heavy while leaving the photon massless -- or severely constrain most models of this phenomenon. Most such models invoke one or more "Higgs bosons" as well as supersymmetric (SUSY) particles that are heavier partners of known quarks, leptons and bosons. These phenomena have yet to be verified by experiment.
The Rutgers CDF group is deeply involved in searches for such new phenomena, including those for SUSY particles and Higgs bosons. Our group has implemented or improved analysis techniques for many of these searches. Members of our group have worked on identification of tau leptons and b-quark decays for Higgs searches. We have studied low energy electrons and muons that can arise from decays of possible supersymmetric particles. We work closely with theorists to refine our searches and create new analyses as understanding of models of new physics grows.
The CDF experiment offers many other fascinating research topics. Although the top quark has been discovered, its properties (such as mass and couplings to other particles) remain poorly understood. CDF will collect thousands of top quarks and detailed study may well find this heaviest of Standard Model particles is affected by new physics. CDF is also poised to collect a large sample of particles containing b-quarks. In addition to searches for new phenomena, these particles can be used to study b-quark couplings, which may reveal new physics. Several other topics, such as precision measurements of W and Z boson masses and asymmetries, searches for quark substructure in jet events, and many others are available to students willing to work with the CDF Rutgers group.
Students, both undergraduate and graduate, have always been a key part of
the high energy physics effort at
Prof. Devlin is analyzing data from CDF to understand the mechanism responsible for polarization of Lambda hyperons. When this is complete, his research efforts will be devoted to astrophysics.
Professors Mohan Kalelkar
We are nearly finished with the analysis of data from an experiment called SLD at the Stanford Linear Collider, studying electron-positron interactions at 91 GeV, the mass of the neutral weak boson Z. A unique feature of our experiment is longitudinal polarization of the electron beam. We have published the world's best measurement of the weak mixing angle, a crucial parameter of the Standard Model, as well as the world's best measurement of the parity-violating coupling of the Z to the s-quark. Our graduate students have written PhD theses on hadron production in Z decays into quarks of different flavors, observing large flavor dependencies that permitted sensitive tests of QCD fragmentation models.
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Revised July, 2009