Rutgers University Department of Physics and
Astronomy
2017-18 Handbook for
Physics and Astronomy Graduate Students
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Research Programs
Experimental Elementary Particle Physics
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 Rutgers, there are
extensive resources for the construction and testing of detectors and
electronics used in experiments, and dedicated computers for the analysis of
the resulting data. Grants in this area provide financial support for advanced
graduate students to spend full time on research, and they do not have to teach
to earn an income.
Professors John Paul Chou, 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 Geneva,
Switzerland.
When the LHC is completed in 2008, it will be the world's highest energy
accelerator, colliding protons on protons at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV,
seven times greater than that currently available. The LHC is a guaranteed
discovery machine. Either the elusive Higgs boson particle will be discovered
or, if not, other unexpected "new physics" must necessarily be found.
The Higgs particle is a remnant of the Higgs Mechanism, the process that is
believed to be the source of all mass. Its discovery would be a major
breakthrough in our understanding of one of the fundamental properties of
nature. Supersymmetry, the ultimate symmetry that relates fermions and bosons,
is also likely to be found at the LHC. Supersymmetry is an elegant theory that
is favored by many theorists and that may point the way toward a quantum theory
of gravity. It is also a necessary ingredient of all string theories. More
speculatively, evidence for large extra dimensions and for strong gravity
manifested by a prolific production of mini black holes might also be seen.
Clearly, the LHC will usher in an exciting new era in fundamental particle
physics research.
Our group at Rutgers is well positioned to
be active and leading participants in this forefront physics program. We plan
to build on the expertise that we have gained in our work on the CDF detector
at Fermilab to play a leading role in most if not all of the prominent physics
studies mentioned above. In particular, we plan, initially, to concentrate on a
search for the Higgs particle via its decay to a pair of tau leptons, the most
sensitive decay mode in many supersymmetric Higgs scenarios. The ability to
identify tau leptons will also be important in many supersymmetric particle
searches and measurements providing a wealth of thesis opportunities.
Identification of tau leptons in the large background of QCD jets at the LHC
will be challenging. The expertise that our group has gained in developing
these techniques in the "real world" environment of the CDF detector
at the Fermilab Collider should prove invaluable.
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 Rutgers
during 2006 and 2007 and deliver the device to CERN for installation at CMS in
time for the first physics running in 2008. This would be an excellent project
for a graduate student to work on. It is a small scale device that a student
could really "get their hands on" while, at the same time, learning
state-of-the-art detector technology and electronics and participating in the
large CMS Collaboration.
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Please send any comments on this page to graduate@physics.rutgers.edu.
Revised October, 2017