Hauser - Present Research

Jay Hauser: Present Research Activities

I work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. This experiment looks for evidence of new particles or forces by studying high-energy collisions between proton beams in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator. Currently I am spending most of my time in Geneva, serving as the Project Manager for the part of CMS known as the Cathode Strip Chamber (CSC) muon detector.

The types of questions we are trying to answer are:

What is the mechanism by which the symmetry of electromagnetic forces and weak forces is "broken"? Is it the famous Higgs boson, or something else like a new force (for example Technicolor)?
Does the universe consist of 10 dimensions, of which 3 are space, 1 is time, and 6 are curled up in tiny balls? Or maybe there are actually 11 dimensions... these are purely theoretical ideas of String Theory .
Do the clouds of Dark Matter that surround the galaxies consist of particles that can be produced in our collisions?
If we find the Dark Matter particles, do they come from a previously-undiscovered symmetry between force and matter particles? (Supersymmetry)

In the past, my group has built large numbers of electronics cards for triggering (selecting) muons with the CSC muon detector, and has done a tremendous amount of work to get this large and complex detector running smoothly. We have also made a specialty of refining the timing of the CSC detector.

I work closely with UCLA Profs. Robert Cousins and David Saltzberg on the CMS experiment.

Present and Future Research Interests (updated June 2002):

In July 2003, I gave the following talk (click on the picture to see the whole thing - 7 Mb Acrobat PDF file):

The UCLA Hadron Collider research group, led by Profs. Robert Cousins, David Saltzberg, Rainer Wallny, and myself, is looking for new particles and interactions at the high-energy experimental frontier, particularly those predicted by the theory of Supersymmetry. Particle accelerators at Fermilab, SLAC, and CERN laboratories are the "telescopes" of this field, allowing us to peer deeply into the structure of matter at the smallest distances.

The Experiments:

The CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment is now taking data for the first time since 1996. Protons that are accelerated to an energy of 1 trillion volts are colliding head-on against anti-protons of the same energy in this experiment. The CDF group at UCLA is currently debugging and preparing to analyze data from this experiment.

During the new CDF "Run-II", at least twenty times as much data should be collected as we currently have. During this run we hope to find supersymmetry, to understand the top quark better, to be first to discover CP violation in bottom quark decays, to make precision measurements of the electroweak unification, and to push the limits of quantum chromo-dynamics (QCD). Meanwhile, most of the detector has been upgraded to take data with the much more intense beams. In particular, our group is finishing up work on a new and improved! calorimeter for CDF. My colleague, Prof. David Saltzberg, is working on alignment and trigger upgrade projects.

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment will collide beams of protons having 7 times as much energy, and with a rate about 100 times higher than at CDF, when everything is ready in 2006. This year, the CMS group at UCLA is preparing large numbers of electronics cards that will collect and sort data produced by this experiment.

At that time, the high-energy frontier will shift to Europe, where the LHC accelerator will produce proton-proton collisions having seven times as much energy as the collisions currently produced by the Fermilab accelerator. The prime goals are to search for the Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the Holy Grail of high energy particle physics, and Supersymmetric particles. It is unlikely (but not impossible!) that these particles will be detected at the Tevatron, while the LHC has a very good shot at both. Leptons, such as muons and electrons, play a key role in the discovery of these particles. My UCLA group is designing hardware to identify and measure the muons produced in these collisions as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment.

Graduate Students:

2nd year graduate student Brian Mohr will be working with our group this summer. He will be analyzing data taken with electronics that we designed and built for use at the CMS experiment. If we can efficiently identify cosmic ray muons in a test setup at UCLA, then we will also be able to identify muons from Supersymmetric particles and Higgs particles at the CMS experiment.

Present graduate student Alon Attal has been improving the reconstruction of electrons and photons in the CDF detector by calibrating the 6400 channels of data from scintillating strips in the new Plug Shower Maximum Detector. He is intending to do his thesis research on the search in CDF for 3-lepton events (such as 2 electrons plus a muon, etc) that are a very striking signal for the production of Supersymmetric particles in the proton-antiproton collisions.

My last graduate student, Andrew Scott, analyzed low invariant mass lepton pairs from the last CDF data run. A previous measurement had raised the possibility of a completely unexpected difference between electron and muon pair production rates. Andrew received his PhD in 2000. At last notice, he is off making big bucks at Lucent, meanwhile we are trying to get a paper published on the results.

Before that, Farhad Keyvan analyzed CDF data, looking for production of Supersymmetric particles that decayed into multiple jets (at least 3) and unseen particles that left missing energy in the detector. Farhad received his PhD in 1996. The paper was published in Physical Review D56, R1357-1362 in 1997.