Nigel S. Lockyer

Over the years I have had many students work with me and my colleagues. Criteria number one was that we always had fun. Criteria number two, we had more fun. Finally, criteria number three was you learned a lot.
The following is intended as an introduction to some of the physics research that may be of interest to Penn undergrads or first year graduate students thinking about getting research experience.

Most of my research revolves around the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), which is a high energy physics (HEP) experiment operating at the energy frontier. The Fermilab Tevatron is currently the world's highest energy accelerator, colliding protons with antiprotons at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 trillion volts. The Penn high energy physics 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 800 physicists. A few years ago, WE, along with the sister experiment D0, discovered the sixth and perhaps final quark, called the top quark. The emphasis in research at Penn has been the discovery and subsequent study of the top quark and the study of the bottom quark, which is the fifth quark, and the weak-isospin partner of the top quark. Students and physicists from Penn have measured important properties of the bottom quark, such as its lifetime, its ability to mix into its antiparticle, and its rate of decay into various final states of interest. Recent work involves studying the mass of the top quark, nature's heaviest quark, and maybe the last quark. Maybe not. Most recently we have been searching for evidence of lepton violating, R-Parity violating supersymmetry.
I also collaborate with my colleagues in the PET group in the Department of Radiology, Professors J. Karp and R. Freifelder. Along with physics graduate students, we are trying to improve the performance of the Penn Pet detectors and we have developed a surgical probe for detecting positrons after a patient has been injected with FDG. We hope this technique can be used for patients with breast cancer. If you are interested in learning more, please come and talk with us.

I collaborate with the Dept. of Radiation Oncology, Dr. Richard Maughan (Director of Physics), Dr. Jim McDonough on a cancer treatment facility using protons rather than x-rays. This is an exciting project and there are several interesting topics for students to work on.

I spend significant time doing research with the CDF experiment at Fermilab and accelerator research for the International Linear Collider (ILC), which is still in the planning stages. The Penn group is active in many physics analyses for CDF and hardware development for ILC. Presently there are six Ph.D. graduate students working on these various topics including medical physics. You should come and talk with me about it. You can leave a message at 215 898 5806. Check out CDF at CDF Home Page. For CDF publications please select the link CDF Results and you can then check out the publications and recent presentations and some "easy to understand" particle physics articles under the link "Results of the Week". A few technical papers are given below. Feel free to come and talk with me about them. I will enjoy meeting you and most likely will learn from your questions.

• APS Panofsky Prize (2006)
• APS Fellow

• Co-Spokesperson, SMTF Collaboration (2005-)
• Guest Scientist, Fermilab (2002-2005)
• Co-Spokesperson, CDF Collaboration (2002-2004)
• Co-Head, CDF Operations–Guest Scientist, Fermilab (2001-2002)
• Professor of Physics, University of Pennsylvania (1998-)
• Associate Chair for Graduate Affairs (1997-1998)
• Associate Professor of Physics, University of Pennsylvania (1990-1997)
• Visiting Scientist, SSC Laboratory (1989-90)
• Visiting Scientist (two summers), Fermilab (1987-88)
• Spokesperson, BCD Collaboration (1987-1993)
• Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Pennsylvania(1984-90)
• Spokesperson, MarkII Collaboration (1983-1984)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1980-84)

• F. Abe et al., Measurement of the Lifetime of the Bs Meson Using the Exclusive Decay Mode Bs to J/psi phi Phys. Rev. Lett. 77 1945-1949 (1996).
• W. Kononenko and N. S. Lockyer, Substrate Studies of Cesium-Iodide Photocathodes NIM A 371 (1996) 143-146.
• W. Kononenko et al., Photoemission from 511 KeV gamma rays incident on BaF2 and LaF3 Crystals. NIM A 396 (1997) 172-180.
• F. Ukegawa et al, Results from a 20 scintillator-bar time-of-flight system located inside the CDF solenoid. Nim A 439 (2000) 65-79.
• F. Liu, J. Karp, et al., Design and Performance of a Portable Positron-Sensitive Surgical Probe
• T. Affolder et al., A Measurement of sin2ß from B° -> J/psi K°S with the CDF Detector Phys. Rev. D61 072005 (2000).
• S. Peggs et al., RCMS-A Second Generation Medical Synchrotron Presented at PTCOG, Boston, June 2001.
• CDF CENTRAL OUTER TRACKER. By CDF Collaboration (T. Affolder et al.) Published in Nucl.Instrum.Meth.A526:249-299,2004
• D. Acosta et al., Measurement of ttbar cross section using dilepton events at Tevatron Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 142001 (2004)
• A. Abulencia et al., Search for High Mass Resonances Decaying to e-mu pairs in Proton Antiproton Collisions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 211802 (2006).