LHC Physics Center

What I will be working on:

Following the discovery of the Higgs boson on the 4th of July 2012, it has become important to ask if heavier particles exist in nature that can decay into pairs of these bosons. Such heavy particles would have immense implications for physics beyond the Standard Model, and I will be leading these "fishing expeditions" from the Fermilab LPC using the Higgs boson as a probe into uncharted energy scales. The CMS experiment developed and maintained unique triggers during 2012 to collect data for precisely such expeditions, and I will exploit every bit of it. Whether we snag new physics immediately or not, this di-Higgs expedition needs to be kept alive through the High Luminosity LHC data-taking conditions of the future as we push to higher energies and intensities. This will require radically different triggering capabilities, including the capacity to identify individual tracks from charged particles at the hardware step of the trigger for collecting an event of data. I will be contributing to the R&D efforts at Fermilab towards such "track triggering" where bleeding-edge technologies like 3D chips for rapid pattern recognition within the tracker are being seriously considered.

My role in CMS past and present:

My association with the CMS experiment began in March 2006 with developing the online data acquisition, calibration software and hardware commissioning for the pixel detector as a graduate student at Cornell. I am currently based at the LPC and have been a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the University of Florida on Higgs searches where the Higgs decays into two bottom quarks.