Prof. Boleslaw Wyslouch (CMS) HI, LNS Director
April 3rd 10:30-11:30 AM
In-Person, 26-505
Click here to make an appointment with Prof. Wyslouch.
Professor Wyslouch is studying the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. He and his colleagues are studying extremely hot and dense states of nuclear matter. Professor Wyslouch conducts experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He is one of the founders and leaders of the heavy ion program in the CMS experiment, one of the large, multipurpose particle detectors at the LHC. The results from the first runs of the LHC show, among others, that the hot plasma strongly suppresses production of high energy jets and it redistributes the jet energy among slow particles. The CMS group also discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions but also proton-proton and proton-ion collision. The detailed investigations of these phenomena will last likely for the next several years with LHC planning to increase energy and intensity of the beams. Before joining CMS Professor Wyslouch conducted multiple high energy and nuclear physics experiments at CERN and at Brookhaven National Laboratory RHIC facility. Professor Wyslouch is interested in the computational aspects of nuclear and high energy experiments as well as the development of trigger algorithms for these experiments.
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Prof. Joseph Formaggio (Neutrino & Dark Matter Group)
I am away during MIT’s Open House, however, if you wish to chat about my research, please send me a message through this link (josephf@mit.edu), and I will try to set up a Zoom meeting with you soon. Enjoy your visit to MIT!.
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Prof. Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz (Hadronic Physics Group)
Skype: rfgarciar
Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/302198052
Prof. Garcia Ruiz's research program focuses on precision laser spectroscopy studies of atoms and molecules composed of short-lived radioactive nuclei. Precision measurements of their atomic and molecular structures provide a unique insight into the emergence of nuclear phenomena and the properties of nuclear matter at the limits of existence. Moreover, these radioactive systems offer a new window for our exploration of the fundamental forces of nature, the violation of fundamental symmetries, and the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
Prof. Garcia Ruiz's group is developing novel "tabletop" experiments to study nuclei at the extremes of stability. As these nuclei cannot be found in nature and only live for a fraction of a second, they have to be produced artificially at specialized facilities such as FRIB (US), to TRIUMF (Canada), RIKEN (Japan) and ISOLDE, CERN (Switzerland).
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Prof. Philip Harris (CMS HEP)
April 4th 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM; 2:00-3:00 PM
In-Person, 24-502
Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92904381940
Click here to make an appointment with Prof. Harris.
Philip Harris seeks to discover dark matter and understand the fundamental properties of the Higgs boson. He searches for dark matter in many different forms, from small experiments using a proton beam dump to CMS detector on the Large Hadron Collider. He has performed some of the most precise measurements of the electroweak force in his work. His work complements more conventional dark matter satellite and direct detection experiments providing a new angle. Philip has extended this work towards measurements of the Higgs boson properties and even more exotic signatures, which rely on Artificial Intelligence(AI). His work has heralded a new strategy of Higgs boson measurements that relies on AI to bring a deeper understanding of Higgs interactions.
Philip’s research exploits new techniques in deep learning to search for the unknown as well as new approaches to resolve the structure of quark and gluon decays, known as jet substructure. As one of the founders of the Fast Machine Learning organization, Philip is leading a considerable effort to build real-time deep learning systems using new types of processor technology, including FPGAs, GPUs, and ASICs. This ranges from deep learning on petabit/s data at the LHC to multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational wave detection. Philip maintains an interest in jet substructure measurements in the quark-gluon medium of heavy ion collisions, along with an interest in cutting-edge machine learning techniques.
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Prof. Or Hen (Hadronic Physics Group)
Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/my/orhen
Skype: orchen21
Group's Website
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Professor Hen’s research focuses on studies of QCD effects in the nuclear medium, and the interplay between partonic and nucleonic degrees of freedom in nuclei. Specifically, Hen utilizes high-energy scattering of electron, neutrino, photon, proton and ion off atomic nuclei to study Short-Range Correlations (SRCs): Temporal fluctuations of high-density, high-momentum, nucleon clusters in nuclei. Due to their overlapping quark distributions and strong interaction, SRC pairs serve as a bridge between low-energy nuclear structure, high-density nuclear matter, and high-energy quark distributions (the EMC effect); with important consequences for strong-interaction physics, hadronic structure and astrophysics
Hen and collaborators conducted experiments at the US based Thomas-Jefferson and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories, as well as other accelerators around the world, where they study the structure and characteristics of SRC pairs and examined their effect on various topics in nuclear, particle, atomic and astrophysics.
In addition, Hen leads a program of neutrino-nucleus interaction studies to facilitate next generation precision neutrino oscillation measurements. This program includes leadership of the electrons-for-neutrinos measurement program at Jefferson-Lab and neutrino-argon scattering measurements using the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermilab.
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Prof. Yen-Jie Lee (EPP QCD)
April 3rd 9:00-11:30 AM
April 4th 2:00-4:00 PM
In-Person, 24-413
Click here to make an appointment with Prof. Lee.
Professor Lee is an emerging leader in the field of proton‐proton and heavy ion physics, primarily studying quark‐gluon plasma (QGP), a hot and dense matter created in the collisions of heavy nuclei predicted by lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) calculations. He has an impressive record of extracting information about strong interactions. For example, his work at the CMS experiment at the LHC has helped to show that energy lost by energetic partons (quarks or gluons) traversing the quark‐gluon plasma is converted to lower energy particles emitted at large angles. Dr. Lee’s research aims to move beyond discovery‐era qualitative measurements of QGP and to understand QCD matter in extreme conditions, such as those that existed in the first microseconds of the universe and that are thought to exist at the core of some neutron stars.
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Prof. Richard Milner (Hadronic Physics Group)
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Professor Milner carries out electron scattering experiments over a large range of energies (3 MeV to 27 GeV to date) to principally study the QCD structure of hadrons or to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model. At present, a major focus is the measurement of hard scattering from the proton where in the final state it is left intact and a new article is created, e.g. a photon or meson. This work is carried out at 10.6 GeV energy at Jefferson Lab using the CLAS12 detector. This can open a new window to visualizing the QCD structure of the proton - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-9I0buDi4s This will be pursued at the future Electron-Ion Collider over a much more complete kinematic range. Professor Milner also has polarized He3 ion source and target development projects at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Jefferson Laboratory, respectively. Finally, his group are constructing a new experiment at the ARIEL electron accelerator at the TRIUMF laboratory, Vancouver, Canada to look for new physics at masses of 10-20 MeV. New students will have opportunities to work on all of these projects.
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Prof. Christoph Paus (CMS HEP)
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Fundamental questions in particle physics are Christoph's main research focus while working at the energy frontier: L3 at LEP until the late nineties, CDF at the Tevatron until the CMS experiment at the LHC switched on.
Students in his group have worked on a wide variety of topics. Spanning precision measurements (b-hadron masses, branching ratios and lifetimes) to observations of not before seen standard model processes (observation of Bs-meson mixing and the Higgs boson) and a variety of searches for new physics (ex. magnetic monopoles, CP violation, dark matter). For the analyses the most modern tools, like machine learning or jet-substructure techniques are being used to obtain the best results.
Students are also expected to make major contributions to the detector projects that Christoph is involved in (the computing project and the data acquisition). Those projects often involve coordinating smaller teams of people to work on a well defined goal for the experiment.
After recently graduating three of his students on dark matter searches with CMS he is looking for two new graduate students to join his research efforts. With the upcoming Run 3 (starting in 2021) it is the perfect time to join with various open possibilities in searches for dark matter and for rare B decays, but other topics are possible.
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Prof. Gunther Roland (Relativistic Heavy Ion Group)
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Using collisions of nuclei at very high energies it is possible to create, for a short moment, a state of extreme temperature and density, resembling the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Under these conditions, matter is governed by the strong interaction and exists in the in the form of a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), a deconfined state of quarks and gluons in thermal equilibrium. Experiments at the RHIC and LHC accelerators have shown that the QGP exhibits unexpected collective properties, characterized by transport properties such as its shear viscosity, opacity and vorticity – all of which are found to be the most extreme of all known forms of matter.
Using the CMS experiment at LHC and the sPHENIX experiment under construction at RHIC we are developing new approaches to understand how these collective effects arise from the underlying interactions of quarks and gluons, described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) These approaches combine ideas and techniques from many areas of physics, from condensed matter and nuclear physics to high energy physics and even string theory. The MIT Heavy Ion Group has led the CMS heavy-ion program from the beginning, with numerous technical contributions, and seminal discoveries and ideas that revolutionized our understanding of Hot QCD. For the next decade we are preparing to exploit the complementarity of novel measurements at CMS and the sPHENIX experiment, where Prof. Roland serves as co-spokesperson since 2016.
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Prof. Eluned Smith (LHCb Group)
April 3rd 8:00-11:30 AM; 5:30-6:00 PM
April 5th 11:30 AM, 12:00-5:00 PM
In-Person, 24-417
Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/8987861475
Click here to make an appointment with Prof. Smith.
In the quantum world, even if the mass of new particles puts them out of direct reach of accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, their quantum imprints can nonetheless be seen. My group searches for the quantum-imprints of heavy New Physics particles on beauty-quark transitions. Beauty quarks are particularly likely to be impacted by heavy New Physics, and are produced in copious amounts at the LHC.
Using data recorded by the LHCb detector, me and my group, along with other colleagues at the LHCb experiment, have uncovered unexplained deviations from SM predictions across a range of rare beauty quark transitions, in a phenomena referred to as the flavour anomalies.
My group will use data recorded by the LHCb detector over the next three years to better determine whether the flavour anomalies are caused by quantum imprints from New Physics particles. This will be done using novel measurements that will better disentangle the different quantum contributions that can affect rare beauty quark transitions.
The LHCb detector is unique in many ways, not least because it is the only high energy physics experiment to read out and process all collisions in real-time. This novel approach to recording data will be challenged in the coming years as the rate of data increases. My group is also developing new low-latency machine learning algorithms that can run on different accelerators, including FPGAs and GPUs, to meet this challenge.
I have a range of PhD projects available in the above areas of research that can be tailored to the interests of incoming students. Please don't hesitate reach out for further details at eluned@mit.edu or sign-up above.
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Prof. Samuel Ting (AMS - Electromagnetic Interactions Group)
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/4596336963
Phone: 617-901-2107
Samuel Ting has always proposed and led large, international collaborations in physics. His group has worked in DESY, Hamburg, where they showed that the electron has no measurable size and established the validity of quantum electrodynamics at small distances. Their results also established the close relationship between photons and massive photons (the vector mesons). His group worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory leading to the discovery of an elementary particle of a new kind for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The group later worked on the high energy electron-positron collider, PETRA, in Hamburg leading to the discovery of gluon jets. Subsequently, for many years, the group led a twenty-country, international collaboration at the large electron-positron collider, LEP, at CERN in Geneva. This experiment verified very accurately the Standard Model of particle physics.
The current experiment, AMS, is the only large acceptance, precision particle physics magnetic spectrometer in space. AMS is located on the International Space Station, 400 km above the Earth and orbiting the Earth every 93 minutes. AMS was recently upgraded by NASA during four spacewalks to ensure that it will continue to collect data during the lifetime of the space station. The AMS detector has many redundant instruments to repeatedly measure the charge, the mass, the energy, and the momentum of elementary particles and nuclei across the periodic table. This ability to inter-calibrate the instruments enables AMS to study elementary particles and cosmic nuclei to an accuracy of 1% up to energies of multi-trillion electron volts. Before AMS, cosmic ray results from balloons and satellites typically have an accuracy of 30% to 50%, mostly at low energies.
The results of the AMS experiment to-date contradict the current model of the cosmos. They also contradict the cosmic ray measurements over the last half-century. The advances in accuracy, in momentum range, and in duration have allowed AMS to open a new field of research.
Many students from this group have become international known and accomplished physicists. Graduate students in this group are encouraged to do independent research and select their Ph.D. thesis topics according to their own interests from within the hundreds of billions of cosmic ray data up to energies of trillions of electrons volts and present their results to major international conferences.
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Prof. Mike Williams (LHCb Group)
April 4th 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM; 2:00-4:00 PM
Zoom meeting link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/4285526042
or In-Person, 24-411
Click here to make an appointment with Prof. Williams.
Professor Williams is the founder and leader of the LHCb group at MIT and the inaugural Deputy Director of the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI). He works on advancing our knowledge of fundamental particles by both proposing and performing novel experimental measurements at cutting-edge facilities. He is primarily focused on searching for as-yet-unknown particles and forces, possibly components of the dark sector of matter, and on studying largely unexplored emergent properties of QCD. The LHCb group at MIT is a leader in the LHCb real-time data-processing system. To enable his scientific pursuits, Mike also works on advancing the usage of machine learning algorithms and other state-of-the-art data-science tools within the domain of particle physics research, and on advancing our understanding of AI itself.
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Prof. Lindley Winslow (Neutrino & Dark Matter Group)
Students should contact me by email to schedule a meeting.
Lindley Winslow is an experimental nuclear and particle physicists. Her work focuses on how the physics of fundamental particles shaped our universe and the development of specialized experiments, including novel detector technology and algorithms, to address these questions. This work currently focuses on searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay and axion dark matter. The group is involved in two double-beta decay experiments: the liquid scintillator-based experiment KamLAND-Zen and the bolometer-based experiment CUORE. The group works both remotely in Japan and Italy and has major R&D efforts for both experiments here at MIT. The axion search ABRACADABRA was conceived here at MIT and was the first new axion experiment to probe masses below 1 micro-eV. R&D continues with ABRACADABRA as we work with colleagues at Stanford University on DM Radio-m3.
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