OSU Faculty: K.K. Gan, Harris Kagan, and Richard Kass

ATLAS is a general purpose detector for the study of pp collisions at 14 TeV center-of-mass energy using the LHC collider at CERN. The collider is the highest energy and luminosity collider in the world. One of the major physics goal of the collider is to discover the Higgs, the particle responsible for generating mass of all particles. We are part of the pixel detector group. The pixel detector is the tracking device closest to the interaction region and is designed to improve the charged particle tracking and identification of b quarks in hadronic jets, critical for the Higgs search.

The extreme high energy of the LHC allows us to look for physics beyond the Standard Model. Lepton signatures have been used in the past for several major discoveries. The OSU groups therefore concentrate on using leptons as a tool in the searches for new physics, including the use of W and Z reconstructed in the leptonic decay modes. We can't list the ongoing searches publicly. However, we can provide links to two published analyses that we participated, study of WZ and ZZ productions.

The ATLAS pixel detector consists of three barrel layers and three forward and backward disks. The OSU group leads the R&D, design, fabrication, and maintenance of the on-detector radiation-hard and high-speed optical communication. For the future, we are actively involved in the R&D of the high-speed and radiation-hard optical links. More info is available at the web site of Prof. K.K. Gan.

The OSU group is also a major contributor to the diamond-based Beam Condition Monitor (BCM) and Beam Loss Monitor (BLM). These two devices exploit the radiation-hardness and high-speed signal of diamond. The two devices play a critical role in protecting the ATLAS experiment and measuring the luminosity. For the future, we are actively involved in the R&D on the use of diamond based pixel detector.