Overview: A goal of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland is to understand the nature of the Higgs Boson, recently discovered there in 2012, and to discover new physics beyond the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics. These goals are relevant to the understanding of the Universe at its most fundamental level just in the fleeting fraction of a second just after the Big Bang, and to why we see the Universe as we do now. To meet the challenges of this quest, new theories are advanced, new detectors and accelerators are developed and built, and new computing and analytical methodologies are created, all of which have significant broader impact for the training of young scientists in the near term and the advancement of technological benefits to society over the longer term.
Broader Impact: The emphasis here is on the involvement of undergraduate students directly into the research program. The student will work directly on physics analysis and visit the CERN laboratory. One of the highlights will be the development by the students of an undergraduate research journal at Manhattan College, a potentially exciting means to develop interest and enthusiasm among the students for scientific research.
The next three years represent a transition of the LHC physics program from a collision energy of 8 TeV data-taking and operation, to extended operations and data taking at nearly double the energy, 13-14 TeV. Over a thousand scientists from the United States are involved with this scientific program on several major experiments.
Intellectual Merit: The research to be conducted under this award to Prof Konoplich and his group at Manhattan College is aimed to address deep questions about the nature of the Universe from data collected with the ATLAS experiment, one of the major multipurpose detectors at the LHC. Scientific questions addressed include: is the newly discovered Higgs particle simply the Higgs of the Standard Model or is it part of a larger theoretical picture that includes new particles that could be discovered at the new higher LHC collision energy? What are the detailed properties of this particle? Why is the observed mass of the Higgs boson so low, found to be 126 billion electron volts, or roughly 135 times the mass of the proton? In fact this low mass value is one of the most profound conundrums in all of science and is currently driving much of the scientific discourse in the field of particle physics. These questions are critical to our understanding of the full context of the Standard Model of particle physics and to new physics that lies beyond the Standard Model.
Technically, Konoplich and his group will be collaborating with colleagues at New York University and others in developing and refining the trigger for the ATLAS experiment, and notably the missing energy trigger, which is important for allowing the experiment to be sensitive to new physics. Such a development will be tactically important as the energy and the luminosity (the instantaneous collision rate) of the LHC are increased to meet the demands of the ATLAS program of discovery physics.
