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| thomsone -at- sas.upenn.edu | |
| phone | (215) 898-0997 |
| fax | (215) 898-8512 |
| lab phone | (215) 898-2677 |
| room | 3N8, David Rittenhouse Laboratory |
| links | http://www.physics.upenn.edu/~thomsone/ |
| degree | Ph.D., Experimental Particle Physics, University of Glasgow (1998) B.Sc. (Honors) First Class, Physics, University of Glasgow (1995) |
| keywords | Experimental Particle Physics |
| overview | The next few years will be a very exciting time at the high energy frontier of experimental particle physics, with many interesting opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research! I work on precision measurements of top quark properties and searches for the Higgs boson with the CDF experiment at the Tevatron Collider, which will continue to run through at least 2010 at Fermilab near Chicago. I plan to search for new physics with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, which will commence operation with a year-long run starting in November 2009 and run for much of the next decade at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The top quark is by far the most massive of the sixteen known fundamental particles, and has approximately the same mass as a gold nucleus. I am intrigued by the possibility that the unexplained large mass of the top quark could be due to effects from physics beyond the standard model. I decided to measure the production rate of top quarks at CDF since a deviation from theoretical predictions could indicate new physics in top quark production or decay. To do this, I developed a novel measurement of the cross section with an advanced multivariate technique. From April 2004 to April 2006, I was co-leader of the CDF Top Quark Physics Group, which consisted of over 100 active researchers, including over fifty graduate students from universities in the U.S. and abroad. With postdoctoral researcher Dr. Aafke Kraan, we analyzed the angular distribution of the decay products of the top quark in order to search for the presence of particles beyond the standard model in top quark decay. With postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chris Neu, we measured the production rate of W bosons with associated heavy flavor jets, which is the dominant background to top quark pair production, single top quark production, and one of the search channels for the standard model Higgs boson. With graduate student Justin Keung, we are improving the efficiency of b-jet identification and searching for WZ production in order to improve and validate the search for the Higgs boson. Across the Atlantic at the ATLAS experiment at CERN, I am working with postdoctoral fellows Dr. James Degenhardt and Dr. Sasa Fratina, and graduate students Dominick Olivito and Elizabeth Hines. We are working on commissioning the Transition Radiation Tracker to prepare for first data. We are looking forward to exploring the new energy frontier to be opened up by the CERN LHC from 2008. Research on ATLAS will require a great deal of creativity in a range of areas, from novel approaches in searches for signatures of new massive fundamental particles to achieving an excellent understanding of a detector with 150 million channels to be read-out every 25 nanoseconds! |
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