This award provides three year support for the high energy physics group at Rutgers University New Brunswick. The Rutgers effort is focused primarily upon CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN., but also includes the completion of physics programs at the Tevatron (CDF and D0) and a technology development project for diamond-based high luminosity beam monitors for the LHC (previously supported by an NSF MRI award). This mix of projects exploits the varied expertise of group members while balancing their responsibilities to bring existing efforts to a natural close, to provide thesis opportunities for graduate students, to have a major impact upon LHC physics analyses, and to pave the way for future activities. The broader impacts include holding QuarkNet Summer workshops for high school teachers, participation in the annual Summer Research Program for high school students, work with environmental activists across New Jersey, and continuation of activities in accelerator physics, particularly with undergraduate students.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics is the most successful scientifictheory ever created. It encompasses all the known forces of nature exceptfor gravity, and all known particles of matter. The higgs bosondiscovered in 2012 completed the Standard Model and opened up manymore questions about the fundamental nature of matter. The lightnessof the higgs boson, seventeen orders of magnitude lower than thePlank scale, is a major problem within the current Standard Model. It is so perplexing that it has its own name, the "Hierarchy Problem".Other major open questions, such as the nature of Dark Matter andDark Energy, may well be related to this fundamental problem of hierarchy. There are many theoretical ideas dealing with these problems, theforemost being Supersymmetry. To date, no experimental results havebeen observed in support for any of these "Beyond Standard Model" theories. The Rutgers high energy experimental group is deeply involved insearching for signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model.This grant (NSF-PHY-0969282) allowed us to build the hardware and analyze the data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Members of our group were responsible for designing, building, installing and maintaining significant parts of this complex experiment, especially in the critical area of pixel tracking electronics. We have taken leading roles in helping run the experiment and manage the flow of analyses fromall the groups as well as conducting innovative analyses of ourown. We played a major role in a key channel of the higgs discovery,and conducted innovative new searches for signatures for new physicsmodels such as Supersymmetry, Large Extra Dimensions, Dark Matter, and Black Holes. Our expertise spans varied particles signatures, photons, leptons (electrons, muons, and tau leptons) as well as b-quark and light quark jets. Theseparticles all leave distinct impressions on the detector and we haveused these to search for new phenomena. We have used our photon expertiseto investigate the decay of higgs to photons, a major discovery channel.We have also investigated several Supersymmetric models that contain photons.Our expertise in leptons allowed us to investigate several signatures of Supersymmetry and other new physics (such as a fourth generation of quarks).Our group has also been at the forefront of searches using the fragmentationleft by quarks and gluons, called jets. Since quarks and gluons carry the strong nuclear force, new physics signatures that contain just quarks andgluons can be very difficult to extract from the copious strong force backgroundspresent in hadron collisions such as those at the LHC and Tevatron. With help from our theory colleagues we created innovative search strategies for such new physics. We used these techniques to search for resonances that would signal new physics, as well as extinction of strong processes that may be an indication of microscopic black holes. Sharing the excitement of particle physics has been a major part of ourgroup's mission. In the past few years we have hosted high school students and teachers under the NSF Quarknet program. These groups haveconstructed cosmic ray detectors and readout electronics to observecosmic rays and measure the muon lifetime, analyzed data from the LHC tofind signatures of bound states of quarks as well as W and Z bosons. We have hosted summer students from small colleges across the country that may not have access to major research groups, under the NSF ResearchExperience for Undergraduates (REU) program. Members of our group routinelydiscuss the latest results in various public forums including high schooland middle school science groups.
