This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This CAREER proposal describes a research program that will explore the opportunities for new discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) at CERN using the Compact Muon Solenoid(CMS) detector. With pp collisions at 14 TeV, the LHC is expected to open a vast new window on elementary particle physics phenomena. The intellectual merit of this work includes the exploration of the Higgs particle or of other new particles that could appear in extensions of the Standard Model, as well as the understanding of the pixel detector. The research program presented here is a three-pronged plan to explore beyond-the-Standard-Model physics by studying the light Higgs particle through tau lepton channels, to participate in the commissioning, calibration, and operation of the CMS pixel detector, and to develop upgrade strategies for CMS tracking. Discovery of the Higgs boson and the subsequent exploration of its properties are key goals of the CMS experiment. This is experimentally challenging and requires a detailed understanding of the detector performance, particularly of the pixel vertex detector. The broader impact of this proposal includes bringing the excitement and challenges of experimental particle physics to faculty and students at local community colleges. A pilot program with Cornell students analyzing CLEO data as part of an undergraduate course in particle physics has been very successful. The program described here is truly transformational. The Principle Investigator further develops these tools and makes them available to a broader community of small local 2-year community colleges, thereby providing suitable training for both the teaching faculty and the students involved, so they can participate in actual data analysis.
