The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the current energy frontier destined to uncover the mystery of the Electroweak Symmetry Breaking mechanism and poised to find physics beyond the Standard Model. Participation in the CMS experiment at the LHC is the focal point of the Brown HEP group’s long-term research vision. The new energy frontier facility – the LHC – offers nearly an order of magnitude increase in energy and is destined to bring many exciting new discoveries. The discovery of a Higgs-like boson, announced in July 2012 is a triumph for LHC and the field of particles physics.
Particle Pioneers
Our group is a major player in several key areas of the experiment, ranging from hardware to physics analysis. Our faculty and research physicists have significant leadership responsibilities on CMS, a testament to the success of our effort.Our group has led and played a prominent role in the Higgs boson discovery. Members of our group continue to contribute to a number of precision measurements and set a number of world’s most restrictive limits on new particles, from SUSY to fourth generation quarks to existence of micro-black holes and extra dimensions. The group is positioned well to lead and participate in analyses of the massive amounts of data being delivered by the LHC and make significant contributions to the experiment and its physics. Our group is also a strong contributor to R&D efforts in calorimeter, trigger systems and silicon detectors for the upgrade of the detectors needed for high luminosity running of the LHC in the next decade.
For the past two decades we concentrated our work on the DØ (“D-ZERO”) experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. From DØ’s conception the group members were strong contributors to the detector design, construction and operation and to the physics tools and analyses during the highly successful Run of the Tevatron, which ended in September 2011. We have been major contributors to the top discovery in 1995, and to the first evidence for BS oscillations and for single top production in 2007. Members of our group led the efforts to measure the masses of the top quark and the W boson and their properties, We led the DØ effort that resulted in an unambiguous exclusion of leptoquarks as the explanation for the high Q2 event excess observed by HERA collaborations in 1997.
Our faculty's active and productive research program at CMS experiment at CERN, is aided by a group of several postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students. Members of our group are stationed at the LHC Physics Center (LPC) at Fermilab and at CERN, Switzerland. The associated faculty also contributes via remote collaboration tools (video conferencing) and by frequent travel to the experimental locations.