Radio Detection of Cosmic Neutrinos

• Description

  Ultra high energy showers are be detectable from the radio emission as fast cherenkov radiation wakefields. We are now participating in the ANITA project (see our local ANITA page) to use a long duration balloon flight to point antennas down at the Antarctic ice and find such pulses from neutrinos. Previously, we have observed the Askaryan Effect at SLAC. UCLA graduate student Dawn Williams and I joined a team at JPL and Hawaii using NASA's large-radio telescopes in Goldstone, CA, to look for ultra-high energy neutrinos striking the moon. Our experiment made the cover of the CERN Courier. Amy Connolly has joined our group as a new postdoctoral researcher. Tommy Landers is our lab manager. Other ideas we are working on are to detect radio emission in salt formations and possibly in extensive air showers. You can read about the field in the RADHEP-2000 Workshop proceedings.

• Here are some papers/publications of interest:
  • A Phys. Rev. Letter describes our search for cosmic neutrinos hitting the moon
  • A NIM article describes how large rock-salt formations may be used as neutrino detectors
  • A Phys. Rev. Letter describes how we produced the Askaryan Effect at SLAC.
  • A list of research notes by Dawn Williams summarizes much of what we have learned.
  • The dissertation of Dawn Williams.

  Here is a link for information about UCLA's Astroparticle Physics research.

High-Energy Collider Physics

• Description:

  I perform my research at the CDF detector at the Fermilab Tevatron where we study debris from collisions of protons with anti-protons at 2 TeV (2 trillion electron-volts) center-of-mass energy. These are the highest energy elementary particle collisions in the world and we use them to search for new elementary particles and forces. I collaborate on this experiment with UCLA professors Jay Hauser and Rainer Wallny. Our group's work is described in our highly out of date web page. But below I give links to what I have been most involved with.

• Selected Papers and Works-in-progress:
  • hardware and detector:

    Graduate student, David Goldstein, and I built the The RASNIK Real-Time Relative Alignment Monitors to monitor the position of CDF silicon tracking detectors to micron resolution every minute. UCLA postdoc Jane Nachtman (now Fermilab Wilson Fellow) built the UCLA TrackList Boards which bring all the tracking information into CDF's Level-Two hardware trigger. She, graduate student Matt Worcester, and I did the final integration into the CDF L2 trigger fast decision system. Matt Worcester, Jane Nachtman and post-doc Charles Plager also wrote two of CDF's online Trigger Monitors for the CDF control room: XMon monitors trigger cross sections and TrigMon emulates and monitors the trigger hardware's data paths and decisions. Undergrad Joaquin Vieira and I showed that the project to add timing to the CDF phototubes did not need to open their bases but could split their phototube signals with an RF coupler.

  • Physics analyses:

    With Jay Hauser, his student Andrew Scott, and Benn Tannenbaum we made a measurement of the low mass drell-yan (dilepton) production at the tevatron treating electrons and muons as similarly as possible. We find consistency between the electron and muon channels on which previous work had cast doubt. Jane Nachtman, Matt Worcester and I are trying to open a new channel to search for supersymmetry and other new physics using a Like-Sign Dilepton Search. Graduate student, David Goldstein and I are trying to measure the top quark cross section using dileptons with an endplug electron. With graduate student, Nick Wisniewski, we are participating in a search for flavor-changing-neutral-current decays with B_S mesons.

Click for a List of Selected Papers