UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics

2014

Abstract

This year the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM) High Energy Physics (HEP) group continued with the ongoing research program outlined in the grant proposal. The program is centered on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the proton-proton (pp) collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The main research focus is on data analysis and on the preparation for the High Luminosity (HL) LHC or experiment detector upgrade. The physics data analysis included Higgs Doublet Search and measurement of the (1) Λ0b branching fraction, (2) B meson mass, and (3) hyperon θ-b lifetime. The detector upgrade included work on the preparations for the Forward Pixel (FPIX) detector Silicon Sensor Testing in a production run at Fermilab. In addition, the group has taken responsibilities on the Software Release through our former research associate Dr. Eric Brownson who acted until last December as a Level Two Offline Manager for the CMS Upgrade. In support of the CMS data analysis activities carried out locally, the UPRM group has built and maintains an excellent Tier3 analysis center in Mayaguez. This allowed us to analyze large data samples and to continue the development of algorithms for the upgrade tracking robustness we started several years ago, and we plan to resume in the near future. This project involves computer simulation of the radiation damage to be suffered at the higher luminosities of the upgraded LHC. This year we continued to serve as a source of outstanding students for the field of high energy physics. Three of our graduate students finished their MS work in May, 2014, Their theses research were on data analysis of heavy quark b-physics. All of them are currently enrolled at Ph.D. physics program across the nation. One of them (Hector Moreno) at New Mexico University (Hector Moreno), one at University of New Hampshire (Sandra Santiesteban) and one at University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (Carlos Malca). The students H. Moreno and C. Malca has been directly supervised by Dr. Mendez and S. Santiesteban supervised by Dr. Ramirez. During the last 13 years, our group have graduated 23 MS students on experimental High Energy Physics data analysis and applied hardware techniques. Most of the students have been supported by DOE grants, included this grant. Since 2001, Dr. Mendez have directly supervised eleven students, Dr. Ramirez three students and the former PI (Dr. Lopez) nine students. These theses work are fully documented in the group web page (http://charma.uprm.edu). The High Energy Physics group at Mayaguez is small and presently consists of three Physics faculty members, the Senior Investigators Dr. Hector Mendez (Professor) and Dr. Juan Eduardo Ramirez (Professor), and Dr. Sudhir Malik who was just hired in July 2014. Dr. Ramirez is in charge of the UPRM Tier-3 computing and will be building the network bandwidth infrastructure for the campus, while Dr. Mendez will continues his effort in finishing the heavy quark physics data analysis and moving to work on SUSY analysis for the 2015 data. Our last grant application in 2012 was awarded only for 2013-2014. As a result our postdoc position was lost last month of March. Since then, we have hired Dr. Malik as a new faculty in order to reinforce the group and to continue our efforts with the CMS experiment. Our plan is to hire another junior faculty in the next two years to strengthen the HEP group even further. Dr. Mendez continues with QuarkNet activities involving an ever larger group of high school physics teachers from all around Puerto Rico.

Abstract

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