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Standard Model + Charm Measurements
Precision measurements of the Standard Model processes are a cornerstone of the LHC program, providing crucial insights into background phenomena and the complexities of Quantum Chromodynamics. Our group specializes in studying Standard Model measurements involving charm quarks in the final states, with a focus on enhancing next-generation Monte Carlo simulations. A key area of our research involves measuring processes that contribute to the backgrounds in the search for a Higgs boson decaying into charm quarks. Additionally, we investigate the properties of jet formation originating from initial charm quarks, such as energy transfer during the hadronization process and the production rates of different charmed hadron species. These studies shed light on essential aspects of particle interactions.
Charm Tagging
Identification of charm quarks (charm tagging) is crucial for physics analyses, particularly in the context of the Higgs to charm process. Our current focus lies on developing advanced algorithms that utilize machine learning techniques to enhance charm identification. To ensure their effective application in analyses, we are also measuring the performance of the tagger algorithms using real data.
Higgs to Charm
Since the first laboratory observation of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012, many of its properties have been studied, notably its decay rates to various standard model particles. Some of the more challenging decay modes, such as to a pair of charm quarks, remain elusive because of the difficulty of reliably identifying charm quarks in collision events as well as the large background contributions. Members of our team form a key part of an analysis at CERN that aims to simultaneously measure properties related to the Higgs boson decays to bottom and charm quarks. The outcome of this search could very well be that the Higgs boson properties continue to closely match the current theoretical expectations; however, since the Higgs is sensitive to the presence of many hypothetical particles, any deviation from the expectation could lead to new and interesting physics.
Caption: Candidate Z-boson + Higgs-boson event, where the Z boson decays to two muons (red tracks) and the Higgs boson decays to two charm quarks (blue cones)
Pattern Recognition
Track reconstruction is a key component in particle and nuclear physics experiments but it is a highly CPU-expensive challenge due to the combinatorial nature of the problem. The intense environment of future experiments will put even more computation stress on the current tracking software, motivating the development of novel performant algorithms. We are part of a group developing a new experiment- and framework-independent tracking toolkit, ACTS (A Common Tracking Software), that will be deployed by the ATLAS experiment for HL-LHC operations.
The track reconstruction of future colliders will require more computing time due to the high combinatorics and conventional algorithms for CPU might not meet the computing requirement depending on budgets. The reconstruction can be accelerated with hardware accelerators such as GPU by parallelizing the algorithms. We are developing novel algorithms for GPUs while keeping the same physical performance of the original algorithms.