The UCLA Hadron Collider research group,
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 qua\ ntum 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 Prior to coming to UCLA in 1990, I worked on the CDF experiment at Fermilab as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. During this time, the experiment got its first look at proton-antiproton collisions from the Tevatron accelerator at what is still the highest available energy, 1.8 TeV. I designed and built digital "trigger" electronics for CDF which weeded out the small subset of collisions which were interesting for detailed analysis. Following a suggestion of Jon Rosner and others, I made the first measurement of the W asymmetry, i.e. the angular dependence of the ratio of positrons to electrons from W decay.
When I first came to UCLA in 1990, I founded the UCLA-CDF research group. My interests turned towards finding evidence of Supersymmetry or "SUSY". (The theory of anti-matter predicted a doubling of the number of particles, and was confirmed by discovery of the positron in 1928. The theory of Supersymmetry predicts another(!) doubling of the number of particles, and is often touted by our theoretical colleagues as a necessary "low-energy" limit of superstring theories.) Together with Y. Kato (Osaka U.), S. Lammel (UCLA and Fermilab), and T. Kamon (U. Texas), I set the first limits on SUSY chargino-neutralino production, which make distinctive 3-lepton events. My previous student Farhad Keyvan and I set limits on SUSY squark and/or gluino events, which make distinctive multi-jet plus missing-energy events.