Welcome

My area of research is in experimental particle physics where we use accelerators to search for new particles and study the properties of the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions at the most fundamental level. For the past 50 years, the current theory of particles and fields, known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics has been unexpectedly successful in describing with high precision the results of the great majority of particle physics experiments. Its mechanism of spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking requires the existence of a neutral scalar particle, the Higgs boson. The Standard Model predicts the Higgs boson couplings to all other particles of known mass, but its mass remains unspecified. In the summer of 2012 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations discovered a new particle with a mass of 125 GeV via decays to photon, W and Z boson pairs with rates consistent with those of the Standard Model Higgs boson. It is the last piece in the Standard Model jigsaw-puzzle of the elementary building blocks of matter and their interactions via forces of nature. Despite all the successes of the Standard Model many questions are left unanswered and the Standard Model is unsatisfactory when extrapolated to higher energies. It is widely believed that the Standard Model is an effective ‘low energy’ theory of a more complete theory that addresses many of its shortcomings. The search for phenomena that are not explained by the Standard Model is thus an extremely important activity of experimental high energy physicists.

I am currently involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and my research is focused on measuring the properties of the Higgs boson, the search for new physics beyond the established Standard Model, the understanding of the structure of the proton and large-scale distributed data analysis.

The CMS experiment is one of the two general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, designed to study the physics of proton-proton collisions. It involves more than 3000 scientists and engineers from more than 220 institutes and 50 countries. It is believed that the unprecedented energy range and sensitivity of the LHC, combined with the special capabilities of the CMS experiment will lead to a breakthrough in our understanding of nature.

I have been a member of the CMS collaboration since the early design phase, and my research focus, both current and future, is on the search for new physics using dilepton signatures and on electroweak precision measurements. During the time from the anticipated LHC start-up in 2007 to the first data taking, I have worked on the detailed understanding of the detector and on the physics commissioning of the detector with cosmic muons. After the LHC start-up my group worked on the first measurement of the Z cross section in the dimuon channel, the measurements of the differential and double differential Drell-Yan cross section, the search for high-mass resonances in the dimuon channel, on same-sign dilepton SUSY searches and on the H→μμ analysis. Prior to joining Purdue, I worked on the CMS Level-1 trigger, the search for supersymmetric particles, as well as for rare B-meson decays within the DELPHI experiment at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider and on Bose-Einstein correlation studies within the UA1 experiment.