The award will support the ongoing research program of Professor Stephen Reucroft with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The group's main CMS hardware activity continues on the Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECAL) avalanche photodiode (APD) readout. The group members are coordinators of the CMS electron reconstruction using particle flow techniques - building on the group tracker and ECAL expertise. The award will enable to group to continue their analysis effort working on Standard Model Higgs searches using leptonic final states - building on their electron reconstruction work. This proposal addresses the early discovery era of the LHC. The support will enable the group to work on CMS commissioning work and simultaneously develop electron reconstruction algorithms. These include recovery of bremsstrahlung photons and conversions in the Silicon Tracker and optimize the electron selection efficiency and purity. These tools will then apply to the direct search for the Higgs boson. This support is critical to the group's ability to exploit the considerable investment of more than a decade.
The intellectual merit of the research is profound, addressing fundamental questions, such as the origin of mass. The chosen area of research, the search for the Higgs, is one of the most important analysis of the LHC startup. The broader impact supported by this award include possible technological spin-offs from the photo-detector work to medical physics, biophysics and quantum optics. The group is involved in educational outreach of a broad range of people from elementary school, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, to postdocs.
