CDF at PENN

The Penn group participates in an experiment called The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), which detects the particles produced by colliding protons and anti-protons at the highest energy in the world, that is at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 trillion electron volts. The Penn group has played a major role in the construction, operation, and study of the data from this experiment, which brings together an international collaboration of over 600 physicists. In 1995, CDF, along with the sister experiment D0, discovered the sixth and perhaps final quark, called the top quark. We played a large role in the subsequent upgrade of the CDF detector, by building the read-out electronics for the main charged particle tracking detector, the Central Outer Tracker (COT), and by leading the design and the construction of a particle identification detector, the Time-of-Flight (TOF), that has proven to be vital for the observation of oscillations of the strange B meson into its antiparticle.

In the current CDF data-taking period, from 2001 until 2009, we are collecting and analysing data from the CDF detector. Our job will be to understand that data and address the interesting questions that will surely arise when studying the highest energy collisions in the world. The emphasis of our research at Penn is the study of the properties of the top quark and the bottom quark, and searches for new fundamental particles. More discoveries are hopefully just around the corner!

Recent papers with significant contributions from the Penn group include precision measurement of the top quark mass, tests of the decay properties of the top quark, and the discovery and observation of the mixing frequency of the strange B meson.

• Observation of B0(s) - anti-B0(s) Oscillations. Phys.Rev.Lett.97:242003,2006.
• Top quark mass measurement from dilepton events at CDF II with the matrix-element method. Phys.Rev.D74:032009,2006.
• Search for V + A current in top quark decay in p anti-p collisions at \sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV. Phys. Rev.Lett.98:072001,2007.

Current Faculty, Postdocs and Graduate students

• Professors: Brig Williams, Nigel Lockyer, Joe Kroll Evelyn Thomson
• Senior Research Associate: Joel Heinrich
• Post Doctoral Fellows: Chris Neu, Aart Heijboer, Anadi Canepa
• Graduate Students: Yan-Jun Tu, Elisabetta Pianori, Tatiana Rodriguez
• Instrumentation: Rick Van Berg, Mitch Newcomer, Walt Kononenko

Previous postdocs

• Daniel Whiteson (postdoc, now an assistant professor at University of California at Irvine)
• Aafke Kraan (postdoc, now a Marie Curie Fellow with the European Union at INFN Pisa, Italy)
• Peter Wittich (postdoc, now an assistant professor at Cornell University)
• David Ambrose (postdoc, now a research scientist in industry)
• Fumihiko Ukegawa (postdoc, now a professor at Tsukuba University, Japan)
• Steve Hahn (postdoc, now a scientist at Fermilab)

Previous students

• Kristian Hahn (student, now a postdoc at MIT)
• Denys Usynin (student, now in Industry - Finace)
• Andrew Kovalev (student, now in Industry - Finance)
• Eiko Yu (student, now a postdoc at Fermilab)
• Chunhui Chen (student, now a postdoc at University of Maryland)
• Farrukh Azfar (student, now a lecturer at Oxford University, Britain)
• Owen Long (student, now an assistant Professor at University of California at Riverside)
• Richard Hughes (student, now a professor at Ohio State University)
• Tianjie Gao (student, now in Industry - Finance)

Hardware projects for the Run II upgrade

• Central Outer Tracker Proposal (ps), COT web page
• Time-of-Flight System
• Central Electromagnetic Calorimeter Calibration system