Experimental Studies Into The Nature of The Higgs Mechanism and Searches for New Physics with the ATLAS Experiment

This award will provide support to a single PI group working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC machine and ATLAS, a large particle detector facility, were built as basic science tools using funds from NSF and other agencies around the world. One of their primary objectives was to find the Higgs Boson, the last particle in the historically successful "Standard Model" (SM) that accounts for so much of the existence of, and forces between, known particles forming the matter in the universe.

This effort has been successful. The next step in the experiments is to look for evidence for physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that might, for instance, account for the presence of the mysterious "Dark Matter" that makes up so much of the mass of the universe. The LHC is currently in the midst of analyzing data from Run 2, at almost twice the energy explored earlier and with significantly increased event samples.

It is possible that evidence for BSM physics could emerge at this higher energy and with the higher event statistics. Search for evidence of such physics is the goal of this project along with preparation for the next data taking period starting in late 2021.

The California State University East Bay high energy physics group will use data collected by the ATLAS experiment to probe the mechanism by which fundamental particles acquire mass through electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) and to search for evidence of new physics. The group will search for pairs of Higgs bosons and other exotic particles decaying to pairs of b-quarks and pairs of tau leptons.

Study of such rare events has become more viable as the center-of-mass energy of the LHC is increased to 13 TeV and the luminosity of the accelerator facility is steadily increased. In parallel, upgrades of the ATLAS detector are underway which will allow for further improvements in data recording. The Cal State East Bay group will focus on reconstruction of particle tracks and their association with primary collision vertices, important for the identification and measurement of the b-quarks and tau leptons in complex particle interactions.

Collaboration is planned with the ATLAS group at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to work on the upgrade of the ATLAS tracking detector. This will include studies of radiation damage to pixel detectors used close to the intense beam line at the LHC

This research program will bring the excitement and study of high energy physics to Cal State East Bay, which is recognized as a university with one of the most diverse undergraduate student enrollments in the country. Students in the group will participate in collaborative science, data analysis, and in instrumentation testing at the group's campus laboratories and at SLAC and CERN.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.