With this award, Professor Lannon will pursue a five-year plan to study the production of the Higgs boson in association with top quark pairs. Initial efforts will be directed toward the measurement of top pair production cross sections using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, followed by studies on top pair plus jets production. Ultimately, he hopes to progress to a study of Higgs produced with a top pair. To further this long-term research goal, this award includes support for research and development activities aimed at upgrading the CMS trigger to add information from the tracking system that is not currently used in the trigger. Finally, this award allows Professor Lannon to take advantage of a unique educational activity related to his research. The CMS collaboration has agreed to make a small fraction of the data it collects available to QuarkNet, an outreach program in high energy physics research involving high school students and teachers. Along with a colleague at Notre Dame, Lannon plans to create the necessary infrastructure for data collected by the QuarkNet trigger to be used by QuarkNet participants. Achieving this goal would create a long-term infrastructure that would allow high school students and teachers to share in the experience of doing cutting-edge high energy physics research. This infrastructure can be built upon by future efforts to bring this experience to students of all backgrounds, economic situations, and geographical locations through the use of web-based learning and collaboration tools.
