Each year, the U.S. ATLAS Analysis Support Centers (ASCs) at Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory host distinguished research scholars in a program to foster physics collaboration and enhance U.S. contributions to the ATLAS physics program. The U.S. ATLAS Scholars play an important role in the life of the ASCs as outside guests who bring new ideas and projects. The selected scholars have proposed to use the resources available at an ASC to make major contributions to ATLAS in the areas of physics analysis but also play a leading role in organizing ASC and U.S. ATLAS analysis activities.
The U.S. ATLAS Scholars for 2015-2016 are listed below with their proposed projects:
- Swagato Banerjee (University of Louisville) will work at the LBNL ASC, pursuing searches for dark matter using mono-Higgs signatures, and on the design of the Phase 2 upgrade of the silicon pixel detector, including the impact of extending the coverage to the forward region.
- Chunhui Chen (Iowa State University) will work at the ANL ASC on searches for new heavy resonances and for Higgs boson decays to bbbar, using boosted jet signatures.
- Tae Min Hong (University of Pittsburgh) will work at the BNL ASC on searches for Higgs bosons that are produced via vector boson fusion and decay invisibly. In addition, he will work on physics simulation in support of the design of the gFEX board for the Phase 1 upgrade to the Level 1 calorimeter trigger.
- Reinhard Schwienhorst (Michigan State University) will work at the ANL ASC on developing techniques for identifying boosted top quarks and using them as tools to search for W’ resonances decaying to tb. He will also be engaged in studies of the impact of the Phase 2 upgrade of the calorimeter trigger.
- Gabriella Sciolla (Brandeis University) will work at the BNL ASC on the study of the Higgs boson via the ZZ* to four leptons channel, with the goal being precision measurements of the Higgs boson’s couplings. She will also lead the development of hardware and software for testing ITk barrel staves.
- Dmitri Tsybychev (Stony Brook University) will work at the BNL ASC on longitudinal W boson scattering, searches for alternate electroweak symmetry breaking mechanisms in diboson final states, and rare and exotic Higgs decays. He will also contribute to the development of the readout system for testing ITk strip modules.
We congratulate all of the U.S. ATLAS Scholars and look forward to collaborating with them on their activities.