Prestigious Discoveries at CERN

Prestigious Discoveries at CERN
Author: Roger Cashmore
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2004-09-24
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9783540207504

The discoveries of neutral currents and of the W and Z bosons marked a watershed in the history of CERN. They established the validity of the electroweak theory and convinced physicists of the importance of renormalizable non-Abelian gauge theories of fundamental interactions. The articles collected in this book have been written by distinguished physicists who contributed in a crucial way to these developments. The book provides a historical account of those discoveries and of the construction and testing of the Standard Model. It also contains a discussion of the future of particle physics and gives an updated status of the LHC and its detectors currently being built at CERN. The book addresses those readers interested in particle physics including the educated public.

The Origin of Mass

The Origin of Mass
Author: John Iliopoulos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2017
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0198805179

The discovery of a new elementary particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012 made headlines in world media. Since we already know of a large number of elementary particles, why did this latest discovery generate so much excitement? This small book reveals that this particle provides the key to understanding one of the most extraordinary phenomena which occurred in the early Universe. It introduces the mechanism that made possible, within tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the generation of massive particles. The Origin of Mass is a guided tour of cosmic evolution, from the Big Bang to the elementary particles we study in our accelerators today. The guiding principle of this book is a concept of symmetry which, in a profound and fascinating way, seems to determine the structure of the Universe.

Elementary Particle Physics

Elementary Particle Physics
Author: John Iliopoulos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2021-10-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0192658166

Since the development of natural philosophy in Ancient Greece, scientists have been concerned with determining the nature of matter's smallest constituents and the interactions among them. This textbook examines the question of the microscopic composition of matter through an accessible introduction to what is now called 'The Physics of Elementary Particles'. In the last few decades, elementary particle physics has undergone a period of transition, culminating in the formulation of a new theoretical scheme, known as 'The Standard Model', which has profoundly changed our understanding of nature's fundamental forces. Rooted in the experimental tradition, this new vision is based on geometry and sees the composition of matter in terms of its accordance with certain geometrical principles. This textbook presents and explains this modern viewpoint to a readership of well-motivated undergraduate students, by guiding the reader from the basics to the more advanced concepts of Gauge Symmetry, Quantum Field Theory and the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking through concrete physical examples. This engaging introduction to the theoretical advances and experimental discoveries of the last decades makes this fascinating subject accessible to undergraduate students and aims at motivating them to study it further.

Search for the Higgs Boson Produced in Association with Top Quarks with the CMS Detector at the LHC

Search for the Higgs Boson Produced in Association with Top Quarks with the CMS Detector at the LHC
Author: Cristina Martin Perez
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-02-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3030902064

In this work, the interaction between the Higgs boson and the top quark is studied with the proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV provided by the LHC at the CMS detector at CERN (Geneva). At the LHC, these particles are produced simultaneously via the associate production of the Higgs boson with one top quark (tH process) or two top quarks (ttH process). Compared to many other possible outcomes of the proton-proton interactions, these processes are very rare, as the top quark and the Higgs boson are the heaviest elementary particles known. Hence, identifying them constitutes a significant experimental challenge. A high particle selection efficiency in the CMS detector is therefore crucial. At the core of this selection stands the Level-1 (L1) trigger system, a system that filters collision events to retain only those with potential interest for physics analysis. The selection of hadronically decaying τ leptons, expected from the Higgs boson decays, is especially demanding due to the large background arising from the QCD interactions. The first part of this thesis presents the optimization of the L1 τ algorithm in Run 2 (2016-2018) and Run 3 (2022-2024) of the LHC. It includes the development of a novel trigger concept for the High-Luminosity LHC, foreseen to start in 2027 and to deliver 5 times the current instantaneous luminosity. To this end, sophisticated algorithms based on machine learning approaches are used, facilitated by the increasingly modern technology and powerful computation of the trigger system. The second part of the work presents the search of the tH and ttH processes with the subsequent decays of the Higgs boson to pairs of τ lepton, W bosons or Z bosons, making use of the data recorded during Run 2. The presence of multiple particles in the final state, along with the low cross section of the processes, makes the search an ideal use case for multivariant discriminants that enhance the selectivity of the signals and reject the overwhelming background contributions. The discriminants presented are built using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, able to capture the correlations amongst the processes involved, as well as the so-called Matrix Element Method (MEM), which combines the theoretical description of the processes with the detector resolution effects. The level of sophistication of the methods used, along with the unprecedented amount of collision data analyzed, result in the most stringent measurements of the tH and ttH cross sections up to date.