LHC Physics Center

What I will be working on:

I am currently serving as L3 manager for the CMS Phase 1 Forward Pixel Assembly and Testing project, contributing to the testing of individual modules and also the testing of the half disks and half cylinders before the detector is shipped to CERN. On the analysis front, I am working on finishing a Run 1 legacy paper on searches for resonant ttbar production and preparing for Run 2, where I plan to use the tools developed for the boosted semileptonic ttbar search to search for anomalous ttbar production at 13TeV. I also plan to extend the analysis by adding a large missing transverse energy requirement to probe scalar dark matter couplings to the top quark.

My role in CMS past and present:

I joined CMS in the year 2000 and contributed to the production testing of silicon modules for the CMS Silicon Tracker Outer Barrel detector (CMS NOTE 2004/035) and to the integration and commissioning of the tracker (CMS NOTE 2008/032, CMS NOTE 2009/002, CMS NOTE 2009/003, CMS NOTE 2009/021).

During the MC era, I served as co-leader of the Fermilab LPC btagging group from 2006 to 2009, contributing to the development of methods to measure the performance of the b-tagging algorithms using events containing muons within jets (editor and corresponding author for AN 2007/046, author of AN 2007/048). With 2010 collider data, I contributed to measuring the b-tagging efficiencies in data (AN 2010/336, AN 2011/195, AN 2011/534) and to the measurement of the top pair production cross section in the lepton+jets channel (AN 2010/177, AN 2010/301), published in EPC 71, 1721 (2011) and PRD 84, 092004 (2011). With 2011 data, I led the search for heavy resonances decaying to top quark pairs in the lepton+jet channel (AN 2011/300, AN 2011/449, AN 2012/120), developing techniques to identify boosted semileptonic ttbar decays. I served as editor for a publication that combined these results with a resonance search at threshold, published in JHEP 12 (2012) 015. I then served as contact person for the boosted top quark pair resonance search in the semileptonic channel with 2012 data (B2G-12-006). This analysis was combined with the boosted all hadronic channel and published in PRL 111, 211804 (2013).

I am currently working on a legacy paper that combines this result with a dilepton search and a low mass all hadronic search. The analysis has been preapproved and the paper, aimed at PRD, is under ARC review (B2G-13-008). Since 2013, I am serving as L3 manager for FPix Assembly and Testing. The Phase I CMS upgrade project has recently received CD2/3 DOE review and we expect to start building the detector in early 2015.