This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The award will support the research and educational outreach efforts at the California State University at Fresno. The research on the ATLAS detector at the CERN LHC will include further development of electron identification algorithms, improved statistical analysis method to be used in the search for new physics, and performance studies using reflections of Z decays. The Fresno State ATLAS group plans to apply its performance studies to the incoming ATLAS data. The work will have significant impacts on calibration, detector performance studies, event selections, and systematic uncertainty studies for many new physics searches with the incoming ATLAS data. The award will also support the plans to perform model-independent searches for final states with lepton(s) or photon(s) with statistically optimal method.These final states are sensitive to many new physics beyond the Standard Model, e.g. Higgs, Graviton, and SUSY.
On Broader Impacts, The California State University at Fresno ability to participation in the LHC research program will allow the creation of new outreach and educational possibilities in the CSU system. The research program provides new opportunities, previously unavailable to CSU campuses, for CSU graduate and undergraduate students to pursue research at the LHC. A summer program to allow beginning graduate and undergraduate students to work at CERN for 6 weeks has been initiated. The group plans to foster collaboration with faculty and students from other CSU campuses, high school teachers and students in Central Valley area, with the creation of new outreach and educational programs, including participation in the QuarkNet.
