With this award, Professor Neubauer will pursue a five-year plan to develop strategies for processing, analyzing, and visualizing vast quantities of data obtained with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In collaboration with personnel at the University of Chicago, hardware will be developed for a fast hardware tracker (FTK) system as an upgrade to the current ATLAS trigger system. Designed to exploit unique tracking signatures produced by events of interest, this system will be crucial for maintaining good efficiency and operational stability of the ATLAS trigger. Data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC will be analyzed in novel ways to try to elucidate the unknown physics behind electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) and discover new physics at the TeV scale. Course materials in multivariate analysis and scientific GPU computing that will cut across departmental boundaries will be developed for a new special topics graduate-level class, Advanced Analysis Techniques. Finally, curriculum developed for the NSF sponsored EnLiST-L program (Entrepreneurial Leadership in Science Teaching and Learning) will be more widely disseminated through the use of technology, thereby increasing the engagement of underserved individuals and communities, including at-risk youth in the Chicago area and the hearing-impaired. The project will also enhance existing infrastructure to support collaborative science requiring data-intensive computing in the U.S. through active participation in the Open Science Grid.
