Supervisors: David Petyt (RAL PPD) + Henning Flaecher (Bristol U)
In this studentship you will develop and test improved electron/photon trigger algorithms to harness the significant improvements offered by the upgrade of the CMS Crystal Electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) for HL-LHC (2029+). The upgrade will provide enhanced spatial and timing information to the Level-1 trigger, and a greatly improved rejection of anomalous signals in the ECAL photodetectors that would otherwise generate unacceptably high triggering rates. The use of high-performance FPGAs will allow more advanced algorithms to be developed using High Level Synthesis (HLS) that will take full advantage of this higher resolution data to improve the triggering capability of CMS in Phase 2. You will be involved in HLS firmware and C++ emulator algorithm developments, test-beam participation at CERN and the associated data analysis. You will also have the possibility to take part in the testing and commissioning of the newly installed ECAL on-detector and off-detector electronics at CERN starting from 2026. LHC Run 3 (2022-25) will provide a rich dataset for Physics, more than doubling the integrated luminosity that has been delivered up to now. You will make a significant contribution to a leading physics analysis that fully exploits these data. Our groups have a long-standing interest in Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) models, such as the NMSSM, which have extended Higgs sectors including light Higgs bosons. You will participate in the analysis of events targeting light Higgs bosons in the final state and will develop state-of-the-art reconstruction techniques making full use of the latest machine learning methods.
