Meet the top quark, the heavyweight champion of the subatomic world, tipping the scales at a mass comparable to a single tungsten atom. Unlike its lighter counterparts, this elusive particle has a flair for the dramatic by boasting the shortest lifespan of all quarks and the unique ability to be measured as a "free" quark, for a fleeting moment, before decaying. With the discovery of the Higgs...
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, designed to test the Standard Model and probe new frontiers in physics. One of its primary objectives was the discovery of the Higgs boson, whose detection confirmed the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and explained the origin of mass for weak force mediators. The current focus of Higgs studies at...
Imagine constructing a cosmic ray detector: a few layers of scintillator, some SiPMs, and an excited student wiring it all together. Easy! Your design is segmented to allow for tracking, but what is the best way to reconstruct that track? How do you properly account for all positions within a scintillator volume being equally likely? Come join me for a light-hearted talk about how to draw...
With recent updates on the experimental measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment ($a_\mu=\left(g-2\right)_\mu/2$) at Fermilab, the discrepancy between experimental results and Standard Model predictions is heightened to $5.0\sigma$. Along with the dependencies between the theoretical predictions from lattice QCD and data-driven methods, we establish upper and lower bounds for the...
