My research group 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.
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 is off making big bucks at Lucent, meanwhile we are trying to get a paper published on the results.
A new run, CDF Run-II, with twenty times more data, is scheduled to begin in 1999. 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 is being completely 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 for CDF.
Early in the next millennium, 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.