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David Stuart Professor of Physics 5113 Broida Hall University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 UCSB office: 5113 Broida, (805) 893-5147 CERN office: Bat. 510-1-006, phone: 79809 Cell phone at CERN: 076 710 76 81 (replace the leading 0 with 41 when calling from the US) |
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My research is in experimental particle physics, where we are striving to understand the fundamental constituents and interactions of matter. I am working on two experiments, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF).
CDF is an experiment that has been studying proton antiproton collisions, at 2 TeV center of mass energy, since the early 90's. With its data, we have made precision measurements of electroweak and strong interactions, observed the top quark and made first measurements of its properties, and explored possible phenomenon beyond the current standard model. My focus has been on the latter, searches for physics beyond the standard model. I have been deeply involved in the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the silicon tracking systems for CDF as well as using those systems to develop new tracking algorithms.
CMS is a new experiment at CERN that, like CDF, will measure properties of the standard model interactions and search for physics beyond it. The much higher energy that it can access with the Large Hadron Collider gives it a considerably larger reach in sensitivity. I have been involved in the construction and commissioning of the outer barrel of silicon at CMS, recently by studying cosmic ray and calibration data. My focus for the first data will be, again, on searches for physics beyond the standard model. One of the main challenges in such searches is to quickly and robustly obtain predictions for the standard model backgrounds. Although we can calculate many of these backgrounds approximately, insufficient precision or reliablity will introduce systematic uncertainties in signals for new physics. I have been developing data-based methods that aim to directly measure and/or cancel the backgrounds, with the primary goal being to obtain predictions that are robust for early data when the calculations and detector modeling may not be complete.