NSF Award
2411502
The Standard Model of particle physics has been a remarkably successful theory, agreeing with several decades of experimental observations involving weak, electromagnetic, and strong interactions. The LHC discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was further confirmation of this success. However, the Standard Model remains an incomplete theory as it fails to explain dark matter and it does not provide an explanation for the mass of light neutrinos. Interestingly, these insufficiencies appear to be part of an intriguing overlap in the sciences describing the largest and smallest scales of the universe: proposed extensions of the Standard Model also shed light on our understanding of the evolution of our universe and the dark matter relic density measured by astronomers. This work exploits the rich particle physics program at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to search for dark matter and other physics beyond the Standard Model.<br/><br/>The expanding LHC data set collected by the CMS experiment offers significant opportunity for new discovery, providing greater sensitivity for new physics signatures which would address questions in both particle physics and cosmology. This research program is aimed at questions motivated by the synergy between these two disciplines, for example, by using events produced through vector boson fusion processes to search for dark matter and supersymmetry. In addition, this effort leverages searches for TeV-scale particles using tau lepton reconstruction and identification, which combined with other techniques, enables targeted searches for interesting new physics such as dark matter, compressed spectra SUSY, heavy neutrinos, leptoquarks, and new heavy neutral gauge bosons such as Z-prime. This research is also enabled by hardware operations and development work on the CMS pixel detector and on development of advanced machine learning data analysis techniques. In addition, the group will undertake multiple education and outreach activities, including the national initiative Quarknet, research experiences for Vanderbilt undergraduates, hosting intern days for local secondary school students, and hosting a "Dark Matter Fest" for students.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
