Jay Hauser: Present Research Activities

Quick update in March 2014 - a lot has happened since this web page was last seriously updated. Who has time to make a nice web page? Some recent highlights: We got our CMS detector, including the CSC muon particle detection system, up and running smoothly and with high efficiency. Kudos to Greg and Misha for that! We took a lot of 7 TeV and 8 TeV proton-proton collision data. The whole year 2010 was spent at 7 TeV, and 2011 and 2012 were years in which data was collected at ever-increasing rates. We discovered the Higgs particle! That at least answered the first question on our "Physics Goals" list below. We looked for heavy stable charged particles but didn't find them :( At least we got a publication out of that, and Chris got a PhD thesis. We are very busy installing new CSC detectors and refurbished electronics in anticipation of a big data run with LHC at a higher energy for proton-proton collisions of 13 TeV and higher rate of collisions starting in 2015. David, Matthias, and Eric were instrumental in building the new CSC chambers, and Andrew did a lot of work on the electronics. This year, I have been leading the preparation of a "Phase 2" upgrade Technical Proposal document on behalf of all the muon detectors of CMS.

Summary as of October 2009

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.

Now as the data begins to accumulate and luminosities increase, we can start to turn our attention to searches for new particles and forces of nature. I work closely with UCLA professors Robert Cousins, David Saltzberg, and Cline, as well as their postdoctoral researchers working on the CMS experiment. A rather detailed picture of what my team was doing as of Oct. 2009 can be found here.

Physics Goals

• 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)?
• 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)
• 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 Superstring Theory. Maybe, in fact, some of the extra dimensions are actually relatively large.

CMS Data Analysis:

• The timing accuracy of the CSC detector is being greatly refined and our group is investigating use of CSC information in a search for slow particles such as predicted in certain theories of Supersymmetry (e.g. a Supersymmetric particle that is the "partner" of the tau lepton).
• The CSC detector is essential for searches for ultra-high energy muons, and we are looking into the specific issue of identifying single-muon events where the muon has extremely large momentum. Such events can arise from the decays of W-prime particles, but are also a generic signature for new physics. Our group is addressing the experimental challenge of rejecting a very high fraction of lower-momentum muons such as from the decays of W bosons.

Publications

• "Precise measurement of the top-quark mass in the lepton+jets topology at CDF II," by CDF Collaboration (A. Abulencia et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 182002 (2007).
• "Search for Anomalous Production of Multilepton Events in pp Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV," by CDF Collaboration (A. Abulencia et al.), Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 131804 (2007).
• "Experience with Trigger Electronics for the Cathode Strip Chamber System of CMS," by Jay Hauser, Proceedings of the 10th workshop on electronics for LHC and future experiments, pp. 292-297, Boston, Sept.\ 2004, CERN-LHCC-2004-030.
• "Search for Gluinos and Squarks at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider," by CDF Collaboration (F. Abe et al.). Phys. Rev. D56, 1357 (1997).
• "Lepton Asymmetry in W-boson Decays from pp Collisions at s =1.8 TeV," by CDF collaboration. Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 1458-1462 (1992).
• "An Experiment Addressing CP and CPT Violation in the K⁰ K⁰ System," by I. Dunietz, J. Hauser, J.L. Rosner, Phys. Rev. D35:2166, (1987).
• "Direct Measurement of Charmed D⁺ and D⁰ Semileptonic Branching Ratios," by Mark III collaboration. Phys. Rev. Lett. 54, 1976 (1985).

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