NSF Award from the Division of Physics
Establishing SM processes and seeking beyond-SM signals with ATLAS, and addressing gap in physics interest of youth in Chicago
- Principal Investigator: Florencia Canelli, PhD, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College; Scientist, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- Start Date: August 15, 2009
- Total Award Amount: $300,000
Project Description
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award will fund the research of Florencia Canelli, an assistant professor in the experimental particle physics group at the University of Chicago. The research work is focused at the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The physics program of the proposal consists of developing searches for physics beyond the standard model while making measurements of known standard model processes. The known processes such as W, Z, and t-tbar production are going to be used to establish a good understanding of the detector, Monte Carlo, and to develop and improve tools such as jet energy corrections, jet resolution and b-tagging algorithms. The award will enable her group to make significant contribution to the commissioning, monitoring and validation of the trigger at the ATLAS experiment. This will involve taking an active part in the running of the experiment as collisions start at the end of 2009.
As an important contribution to the ATLAS upgrade this research proposal also proposes to work within the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition group to design and construct a Fast Tracker Trigger (FTK). Among some of the benefits of having implemented FTK in the ATLAS trigger is that it will allow the possibility of b-quark and tau lepton identification within the online trigger system. The proposal will enable the expansion of the Enrico Fermi Summer Intern program, a program of science lectures series for seventh grade students from the Chicago Public Schools and to the University program which will be complemented with lab sessions on particle physics and tours of Fermi lab. A second outreach program is called “Girls Science Salon”, a program which brings science to girls in 6th through 8th grade with the purpose of encouraging them to pursue science in their education and careers.
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, NSF Award number: 0854935
Florencia Canelli, PhD,
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College; Scientist, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory