This project supports a CAREER program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to search for signatures of dark matter produced by possible new fundamental interactions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment. A key signature of a massive dark matter particle is that it escapes the detector without a trace, causing an apparent large transverse momentum imbalance. The unique contribution of this project is a generic, inclusive search for highly boosted hadronically decaying particles in events with large missing transverse momentum, giving rise to "funny-looking" jets, be they heavy boosted particles (top's, W's, Z's) or light color-singlet boosted particles (axion-like particles), emitted in the cascade decay chains of possible new heavy, pair-produced colored particles. This plan has the potential to shed light on the origin of dark matter and could break new ground in the search for new phenomena at the LHC.
The broader impacts are directed toward high schools in Chicago area, which use an active discovery format of teaching developed at the University of Arizona, known as "Modeling Physics", as well as inner city Chicago schools not using the "Modeling Physics" method. Together with the UIC College of Education's certification program in secondary science education, lesson plans will be developed within the "Modeling Physics" methodology that enable high school teachers to incorporate some of the latest and most exciting scientific developments of particle physics coming from the LHC into their classrooms.
