# Alumni

 Savannah ThaisSarah Demers Postdoctoral AssociatePrinceton Institute for Computational Science and EngineeringUtilizing Electrons in the Search for Associated Higgs Production with the ATLAS Detector: Higgs decaying to a tau pair and vector boson decaying leptonicallyThe Higgs boson was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations in 2012 using data from $\sqrt{s}$=8TeV proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Since the initial discovery of the $H\rightarrow 4l$ and $H\rightarrow \gamma\gamma$ decays, multiple other Higgs analyses of production modes and decay channels have reached discovery significance. This thesis describes the search for the still unobserved vector boson ($V=W^{\pm},Z$) associated Higgs production with the Higgs decaying to a tau lepton... more
 Salvatore AiolaJohn Harris Postdoctoral Research FellowIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (National Institute for Nuclear Research).Jet and heavy-flavor measurements in pp and Pb–Pb collisions with ALICEQuantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD) is the field theory that describes the nuclear interactions, responsible for holding together quarks and gluons inside the atomic nuclei. Despite significant progress made in over four decades of experimental and theoretical work since QCD was established, there remain many open questions, especially regarding the fragmentation process of quarks and gluons and the behavior of QCD in the high-temperature regime. Jets are produced from hard-scattered quarks and... more Elizabeth BoultonDaniel McKinsey Applications of Two-Phase Xenon Time Projection Chambers: Searching for Dark Matter and Special Nuclear MaterialsOver the past four decays, Liquid xenon has emerged as a popular medium for direct detection of dark matter. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment utilized a 300 kg two-phase xenon detector to set a world-leading limit on the WIMP spin-independent cross-section and WIMP mass parameter space with 332 live-days of data collection. This analysis proved especially challenging due to non-uniform, time-evolving drift fields during the WIMP search run, and it required the use of novel... more Dandan JiEric Brown Modeling of the dynamics large-scale coherent structures in the system of Rayleigh-Benard ConvectionWe test the ability of a general low-dimensional model for turbulence to predict geometry-dependent dynamics of large-scale coherent structures, such as convection rolls. The model consists of stochastic ordinary differential equations, which are derived as a function of boundary geometry from the Navier-Stokes equations. The model describes the motion of the LSC in terms of diffusion in a potential. We test the model using Rayleigh-Bénard convection experiments in a cubic container, in... more Zack LasnerDavid DeMille Postdoctoral ResearcherHarvard UniversityOrder-of-magnitude-tighter bound on the electron electric dipole momentThe electron's electric dipole moment (eEDM) is a time-reversal- (T-) violating interaction that is generically predicted to have a magnitude near or above the bounds of current experimental sensitivity in extensions to the Standard Model. We have completed an improved measurement of the electron's electric dipole moment with an order-of-magnitude greater sensitivity than the previous best measurement. The result is consistent with no interaction, |de|<1.1*10^-29 e cm. This upper... more Junjiajia LongThierry Emonet Tower Research Capital LLCFrom Individual to Collective Behavior: The Role of Memory and Diversity in Bacterial NavigationWhat is the best strategy to search in an unknown environment? Navigation with only local information available is a ubiquitous problem in nature, especially when local directional information is unreliable due to limited detection range and accuracy. Facing this challenge, many natural systems, including the chemotactic bacteria Escherichia coli, navigate by registering past information “in memory” and making temporal comparisons to bias their random walk up gradients of signal. In... more James MulliganJohn Harris Postdoctoral AssociateUniversity of California, BerkeleyInclusive jet measurements in Pb-Pb collisions with ALICEDroplets of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma, are produced experimentally in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Studying this deconfined matter may allow insight into a variety of open questions about the high temperature regime of QCD and the emergent behaviors of QCD. One major effort to probe the quark-gluon plasma is the study of high-momentum jets produced in an initial high momentum-transfer scattering of a heavy-ion collision. Measurements have... more Michela PaganiniPaul Tipton Postdoctoral ResearcherFacebook AI ResearchMachine Learning in High Energy Physics: Applications to Electromagnic Shower Generation, Flavor Tagging, and the Search for di-Higgs ProductionThis thesis demonstrate the efficacy of designing and developing machine learning algorithms to selected use cases that encompass many of the outstanding challenges in the field of experimental high energy physics. Although simple implementations of neural networks and boosted decision trees have been used in high energy physics for a long time, the field of machine learning has quickly evolved by devising more complex, fast and stable implementations of learning algorithms. The complexity... more Meredith PowellMeg Urry Porat FellowStanfordWebsiteThe Environments of Accreting Supermassive Black HolesThe details of black hole-galaxy coevolution can be revealed by studying the multi-scale environments of accreting supermassive black holes (SMBH). Using state-of-the-art multiwavelength surveys of complementary depths, volumes, and resolutions, I studied the galaxies and cosmic environments that host Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) to test current models of supermassive black hole fueling and feedback. On galactic scales, I investigated the morphology vs. galaxy properties of 5000 galaxies and... more Matthew SteineckerDavid DeMille Graduate School Student Year 6 (DeMille)FASPHY PhysicsSub-Doppler Laser Cooling and Magnetic Trapping of SrF MoleculesIn recent years, there has been growing interest in methods for producing gases of ultracold polar molecules, driven by proposals to employ ultracold molecules in applications in ultracold chemistry, quantum information and quantum simulation, and precision measurement. Development of direct laser cooling and trapping techniques for molecules has become a particular focus of experimental and theoretical effort, given the success of analogous techniques in producing ultracold atoms and the... more Lucie TvrznikovaDaniel McKinsey Postdoctoral ResearcherLawrence Livermore National LaboratorySub-GeV dark matter searches and electric field studies for the LUX and LZ experimentsAbundant evidence from cosmological and astrophysical observations suggests that the Standard Model does not describe 84% of the matter in our universe. The nature of this dark matter (DM) remains a mystery since it has so far eluded detection in the laboratory. To that end, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment was built to directly observe the interaction of DM with xenon target nuclei. LUX acquired data from April 2013 to May 2016 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in... more
 Andrew GasbarroGeorge Fleming Postdoctoral AssociateAEC and ITP University of BernStudies of Conformal Behavior in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field TheoriesIn this dissertation, we present work towards characterizing various conformal and nearly-conformal quantum field theories nonperturbatively using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques. A key area of interest is the conformal window of four-dimensional gauge theories with Dirac fermions and its potential application to BSM model building. We advocate a research program in which the generic low energy physics of nearly-conformal gauge theories is characterized by combining... more Elena GramelliniBonnie Fleming Postdoctoral AssociateFermilabMeasurement of the negative pion and positive kaon total hadronic cross sections on argon at the LArIAT experimentThe Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) represents one of the most advanced experimental technologies for physics at the Intensity Frontier due to its full 3D-imaging, excellent particle identification and precise calorimetric energy reconstruction. By deploying a LArTPC in a dedicated calibration test beam line at Fermilab, LArIAT (Liquid Argon In A Testbeam) aims to experimentally calibrate this technology in a controlled environment and to provide physics results key to the... more Siddharth PrabhuWalter Goldberger Postdoctoral fellowICTS-TIFR, BengalurGluon and Graviton Radiation from the Classical Double CopyMotivated by the BCJ double copy in quantum field theory, we demonstrate a correspondence between perturbative solutions of classical scalar, gauge and gravity theories. First, we show that classical Yang-Mills radiation from a system of colored particles can be obtained from classical bi-adjoint scalar radiation emitted by a corresponding system of bi-adjoint colored particles, via a simple set of color-kinematic substitution rules. This completes a two-fold double copy that can be used to... more Jared VasquezPaul Tipton Senior Data ScientistGE DigitalIlluminating the Higgs boson: Measurement of the properties of the Higgs boson in the diphoton channelThis thesis presents results for measurements of the Standard Model Higgs boson properties and production as measured in the diphoton decay channel using 36.1/fb of proton–proton collision data collected at √s = 13 TeV by the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016. All the measurements are performed under the assumption that the Higgs boson mass is 125.09 GeV and are compared to Standard Model predictions. No significant deviations of the measurements to the Standard Model predictions are... more