Supervisors: Dr. William Panduro Vazquez (RAL/PPD) & Prof. Veronique Boisvert (Royal Holloway, University of London)
ATLAS is a one of four major experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Designed as a general-purpose detector, it is sensitive to a wide range of physical phenomena and focuses on searches for new physics as well as precision measurements of existing standard model processes. At the end of this decade ATLAS will install an ambitious set of upgrades to prepare for High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), where nearly ten times the Run 1-3 LHC dataset will be recorded and greatly increase the experiment's sensitivity to new physics.
This jointly supervised ATLAS studentship will have both a technical focus at RAL, working towards the HL-LHC upgrade; and a physics focus at Royal Holloway, University of London, analysing the current dataset for signs of new phenomena.
The technical focus will be on the Global Trigger, a new component of the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition system for HL-LHC. The Global Trigger is made up of a farm of approximately 50 high-performance FPGA-based processing boards, which will analyse data from the ATLAS calorimeter and muon systems in real-time at the full LHC collision rate of 40 MHz. By 'time multiplexing' all data for each event on a single FPGA, the Global Trigger will be able to perform complex analyses at high speed, exploiting the full event topology. The student will play a leading role in the integration and commissioning of the Global Trigger, contributing to the development of a complex distributed system using cutting edge real-time electronics.
The physics focus will be on searches for Lepton Flavour Universality Violation (LFUV) using top quark events with the ATLAS Run 2 and Run 3 datasets. The top quark is the heaviest particle discovered so far and as such has a special relationship with the Higgs boson. According to the Standard Model, leptons of different flavours have identical properties. Recent results from the g-2 and LHCb experiments seem to indicate some violation of this principle, which, if confirmed, would be a dramatic development in our understanding of particle physics. Top quarks decay into a W boson and a b quark. The b quark hadronises into a B-hadron. By comparing the rates of B-hadrons decaying into a muon or a tau it will be possible to search for LFUV. This proposed analysis has never been done before on ATLAS and will make use of state-of-the-art Machine Learning and unfolding techniques. The student will therefore have the opportunity to make a major contribution to ATLAS searches for new physics in an area that is one of the current hot topics for the field.
For more details, contact William Panduro Vazquez (Will.Panduro-Vazquez@stfc.ac.uk) or Veronique Boisvert (veronique.boisvert@rhul.ac.uk).
