Duke Physics News

The US ATLAS Collaboration held its annual workshop at the University of Michigan on August 13-15, 2012. This meeting is used to review the status of current measurements at the Large Hadron Collider being made using data collected by the ATLAS detector.

Several Duke students presented results of ATLAS research topics they have been working on during the summer of 2012: Will DiClemente, Josh Loyal, Chris Pollard and Meg Shea. The photo at right shows the students with their faculty advisors Profs. Al Goshaw and Ashutosh Kotwal. Results were presented on Duke research on new electroweak SM tests (quartic couplings), Higgs boson searches (H -> Zg), searches for top quark resonances and other measurements that test Standard Model theory using 7 and 8 TeV proton-proton collisions.

Research projects were presented by students and post docs in a poster session, and reviewed by a panel of senior physicists who judged the research content and an oral presentation of the research project. We were very pleased that one of undergraduate students, Will DiClemente, received the Outstanding Poster Award for his measurements of the production of a W boson with two high energy photons, and an analysis that searches for the quartic WWgg coupling predicted by the Standard Model. See the attached photo
of Will with his winning poster.

Will started this project in the summer of 2012 and will continue research this fall working with Prof. Al Goshaw and graduate student Mia Liu. This research will use 8 TeV proton-proton data collected by the ATLAS detector. The goal is a first measurement of an electroweak quartic coupling that is predicted by the Standard Model. This measurement will be used by Will for his senior thesis.

Graduate students Hannah Guilbert, Meizhen Shi, and Bonnie Schmittberger in Prof. Dan Gauthier‘s group, graduate student Huaixiu Zheng in Prof. Harold Baranger‘s group, and former Duke undergraduate Physics major Crystal Senko attended a Gordon Research Conference at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts from August 12-17. The topic of the conference, Quantum Science, brought together some of the world’s top researchers in the fields of Atomic and Optical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, and Quantum Information Science. In the spirit of all Gordon Research Conferences, this experience granted graduate students the opportunity to not only listen to talks from the best in their respective fields, but also to learn about their unpublished work and immediate goals. The attending graduate students were also honored to present posters on their own research, which allowed them to receive feedback and questions from both fellow graduate students and top research scientists from around the world. They are pictured here with all conference attendees and speakers.