LHC Physics Center

What I will be working on:

As an LPC Graduate Scholar, I plan to do detector upgrade work with the HGCAL scintillator tile module assembly efforts hosted at Fermilab. This will involve tasks such as quality control of the scintillator tiles, improving an optical camera system for the pick-and-place machine, testing the printed circuit boards, and cosmic ray testing, among other tasks. I also plan to do analysis work searching for heavy stable charged particles (HSCPs) utilizing machine learning techniques. HSCPs are particles theorized to have large masses, long lifetimes, and non-zero electric charge, with anomalous dE/dx in the tracker and delayed arrivals in the muon system. The standard analysis for HSCPs runs into a few problems that machine learning techniques can address, but HSCPs lack dependable simulations of background events. Detector data must be used to produce a “data-driven” background sample for training, and carrying out this task will be a large portion of my work. I plan to implement this machine learning analysis for HSCPs utilizing Run 2 data from 2017 & 2018 and Run 3 data from 2022 as well.

My role in CMS past and present:

I joined CMS in 2016 as an undergraduate student at the University of Notre Dame. I first worked on the HCAL Phase-1 upgrade hardware project, where I built components of optical decoder units and their calibration units. From 2017 to 2019 at Notre Dame and at the University of Rome Sapienza, I worked on a high-p_T (> 200 GeV) photon identification project for the e/gamma physics object group. I developed optimized ID at various working points and wrote my senior thesis on the project in 2019. Since coming to FSU for my graduate studies in 2019, I have worked on heavy stable charged particles searches, where I am developing neural networks and other classification methods to improve signal discrimination. I also work on the HGCAL scintillator tile module assembly at Fermilab.