With the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, the range and scope of possible new physics signatures is vast. The Vanderbilt High Energy Physics group has carefully designed a science roadmap that tackles promising and physically well-motivated models/theories, while maintaining sensitivity to more general exotic signatures. This program capitalizes on their established expertise in tau lepton reconstruction and identification and their growing expertise in top quark physics. They exploit this focused toolset to perform searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM), targeting interesting new physics such as the so far elusive Higgs boson, new high mass resonances, Supersymmetry, grand unification of the fundamental forces, and dark matter. This program of utilizing tau and top expertise to search for new physics also provides the backbone for a more extensive long-term vision aimed at providing precision measurements that will help the physics community distinguish between the vast range of physics models.
In broader impacts of their research effort, the Vanderbilt HEP group's collaborative efforts with computer scientists are breaking new ground in the area of data logistics through two projects funded by separate NSF awards: REDDnet and DYNES. REDDnet is designed to provide a large distributed storage facility for data intensive collaboration among the nations researchers and educators in a wide variety of application areas. Its mission is to provide working storage to help manage the logistics of moving and staging large amounts of data in the wide area network. REDDnet is serving researchers from a wide variety of application domains, including a digital archive project in the Library of Congress, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, and HEP. DYNES is a nationwide cyber-instrument spanning about forty US universities and eleven Internet2 connectors. A collaborative team including Internet2, Caltech, the University of Michigan, and Vanderbilt University is working to support large, long-distance scientific data flows from the LHC and other leading programs in data intensive science. The Vanderbilt HEP group has also led a Vanderbilt campus-wide effort to develop a researcher-driven campus-computing center.
The Vanderbilt HEP group benefits greatly from the participation of undergraduates in their program. And the group is operating a very active local QuarkNet center that has been an important component of the national QuarkNet Program for nearly a decade.
