Contact Info
last updated Jan 22, 2008
Emily Thompson
1036 Lederle Graduate Research Tower
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Email: emily.thompson@cern.ch
Phone: +41 22 76 76326 (CERN)
Research
Elementary Particle Physics
Our group is involved with the ATLAS Experiment, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Scheduled to begin running in the spring of 2009, the ATLAS detector will be collecting data from high energy (up to 14 TeV!!) proton-proton collisions accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider.
CLICK LEFT!
Showing a fall to Earth, aerial view of Switzerland,
the LHC ring, CERN, diving underground to the ATLAS pit, and finally a layered view of the detector.
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| For more ATLAS animations, visit atlas.ch/multimedia | |
Contact Interactions in the Dimuon Final State
My current doctoral research involves the search for new physics with dimuon signatures, particularly in the form of an excess in the long, high-mass tail of the Drell-Yan spectrum. Beyond the Standard Model processes might exist at an energy scale higher than we will be able to reach at the LHC. Pictorially, this can be understood as a "contact" between incoming partons and final state muons at some scale &Lambda .
Quark or lepton compositeness:
As far as we know today, quarks and leptons appear as elementary particles. However, they may be comprised of constituent parts, or "preons",
which are bound together below some energy scale &Lambda .
Large Extra Dimmensions:
In the ADD model, &Lambda is related to the Plank scale on the bulk. Unlike the fundamental Plank scale on the brane we live on,
the Plank scale on the bulk is anticipated to be on the order of ~1 TeV.
Muon Spectrometer Performance
Within the context of the Lepton+X subgroup of Exotics Physics, I have been involved in determining track-finding efficiencies of the Muon Spectrometer using the tag-probe method, and propagating this efficiency to the high-energy regime (200+ GeV) where previously undiscovered particles, such as the Z' heavy gauge boson, may live. We are currently developing this method within the offline DQA framework, to determine the efficiency and resolution for combined muons (MS + Inner Detector tracks) as a function of eta, phi, pT and various other cuts, such as isolation.