Research

The group research interests cover a wide range from studies of QCD production to the standard model Higgs boson searches. The research activities at present exploit the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN during its run at 7 TeV and at 8 TeV, and collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. From the very beginning of the LHC run, the group has been involved in heavy flavour related analysis, which lead to excellent PhD theses and notable papers published in major international journals.

Complementary the group is involved in the design of the Mu3e experiment, a novel experiment at Paul-Scherrer-Institut (PSI) to search for the lepton-flavour violating decay where an anti-muon decays into two positrons and an electron without accompanying neutrinos.

Enlarged view: muon event display
Display of a Muon event

During the first year of data taking of CMS, the interest of the group was mainly directed to the detailed studies of QCD production, with a particular emphasis on the heavy flavour sector, such as beauty (aka bottom) quarks. The group developed innovative algorithms to identify beauty-flavour production in a phase space region never observed before. Using this novel technique the angular correlations between beauty-hadrons have been measured and published. It was found that all the present simulations are incapable to describe correctly the data. This is true in particular in the small opening angle region where gluon-splitting processes are dominant. These results contributed precious information to the theory community researches.

Thanks to the experience collected with the first few inverse picobarn of data, the group interests turned into the search for the standard model Higgs boson.  Due to our expertise in b-tagging we concentrate on the decay into beauty quarks. The Higgs search had its major achievement with a discovery of a new boson announced on July 4th, 2012 at CERN. The characteristics of the nature of these boson, so far completely compatible with the standard model Higgs boson, and the detailed study of its properties are the present goals of the group.

CMS collaboration
(Part of the) CMS collaboration in front of a real-size CMS-picture
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