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Title: UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics

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) Λ 0 b 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 ofmore » 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.« less

Authors:
 [1]
+ Show Author Affiliations
  1. Univ. of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez (Puerto Rico)
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, Mayaguez (Puerto Rico)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
OSTI Identifier:
1195544
Report Number(s):
DOE-UPRM-0010524
DOE Contract Number:
SC0010524
Resource Type:
Technical Report
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Citation Formats

Mendez, Hector. UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics. United States: N. p., 2014. Web. doi:10.2172/1195544.
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Mendez, Hector. UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics. United States. doi:10.2172/1195544.
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Mendez, Hector. Fri . "UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics". United States. doi:10.2172/1195544. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1195544.
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@article{osti_1195544,
title = {UPR/Mayaguez High Energy Physics},
author = {Mendez, Hector},
abstractNote = {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.},
doi = {10.2172/1195544},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Fri Oct 31 00:00:00 EDT 2014},
month = {Fri Oct 31 00:00:00 EDT 2014}
}
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DOI:  10.2172/1195544
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  • For the period of sixteen years covered by this report (June 1, 1997 - July 31, 2013) the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez Campus (UPRM) carried out an extensive research program that included major experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Cornell Electron-positron Collider and CERN. In particular, these were E831 (FOCUS) at Fermilab, CLEOc at Cornell and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The group’s history is one of successful execution and growth. Beginning with one faculty researcher in 1985, it eventually included four facultymore » researchers, one post-doctoral research associate, two undergraduates and as many as six graduate students at one time working on one of the experiments that discovered the Higgs boson. Some of this expansion was due to the group’s leveraging of funds from the Department of Energy’s core grant to attract funds from National Science Foundation programs not targeted to high energy physics. Besides the group’s research productivity, its other major contribution was the training of a large number of MS students who later went on to successful technical careers in industry as well as academia including many who obtained PhD degrees at US universities. In an attempt to document this history, this final report gives a general description of the Group’s work prior to June 1, 2010, the starting date for the last grant renewal period. Much more detail can, of course, be found in the annual reports submitted up to that date. The work during the last grant period is discussed in detail in a separate section. To summarize the group’s scientific accomplishments, one can point to the results of the experiments. Both FOCUS and CLEOc were designed to carry out precise measurements of processes involving the heavy quarks, charm and bottom. Heavy quarks are particularly interesting because, due to their mass, theoretical calculations based on the Standard Model have less uncertainty than those for the light quarks. Precise heavy quark experiments can therefore yield some of the best tests of the Standard Model and of the approximations that are made in calculating measurable observables. Both FOCUS and CLEOc were highly successful achieving significant improvement in the precision of measurements such as lifetimes and decay branching ratios. For example, FOCUS obtained a data sample that contained ten times as many heavy quark decay events as its predecessor. CMS was a big shift in the group’s research. During the first decade of the century it became clear that the LHC would be the world’s highest energy accelerator offering a unique opportunity for discovery. Given the UPRM’s group record of achievement, it was successful in obtaining admission to the CMS collaboration in March, 2006, becoming the first institution to do so that did not have a PhD program. CMS is one of two major experiments at the LHC. Although the plans are for these experiments to run for many years with increased energy and event rates, they have already achieved one of their principal goals. The test for the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle which plays a unique role in the Standard Model but had not been observed, was answered in the affirmative in 2012.The particular contributions of the UPRM group to these experiments make up the majority of this report although other contributions such as the training of students, outreach to the general community and the organization of scientific meetings are also discussed.« less

  • ; ;
    No abstract prepared.

  • This report discusses the following research: fixed target experiments; collider experiments; computing, networking and VAX upgrade; SSC preparation, detector development and detector construction; solid argon calorimetry; absorption of CAD system geometries into GEANT for SSC; and particle theory programs.

  • The effort of the experimental group has been concentrated on the CERN ALEPH and FERMILAB D0 collider experiments and completion of two fixed target experiments. The BNL fixed target experiment 771 took the world's largest sample of D(1285) and E/iota(1420) events, using pion, kaon and antiproton beams. Observing the following resonances: 0[sup [minus plus]] [1280], 1[sup [plus][plus]] [1280], 0[sup [minus plus]] [1420], 0[sup [minus plus]] [1470], 1[sup [plus minus]] [1415]. The Fermilab fixed target experiment E711, dihadron production in pN interactions at 800 GeV, completed data reduction and analysis. The atomic weight dependence, when parameterized as [sigma](A) = [sigma][sub o]A[supmore » [alpha]], yielded a value of [alpha] = 1.043 [plus minus] 0.011 [plus minus] .012. The cross section per nucleon and angular distributions was also measured as a function of two particle mass and agrees very well with QCD calculations. The D0 Fermilab Collider Experiment E740 began its first data taking run in April 1992. The CERN collider experiment ALEPH at LEP is presently taking more data. The Z mass and width, the couplings to the upper and lower components of the hadronic isospin doublet, forward-backward asymmetries of hadronic events, and measurements of the fragmentation process have been made. The effort of detector development for the SSC has substantially increased with particular emphasis on scintillators, both in fibers and plates. Work has continued on higher-order QCD calculations using the Monte Carlo technique developed previously. This year results for WW, ZZ, WZ, and [sub [gamma][gamma]] production have been published. A method for incorporating parton showering in such calculations was developed and applied to W production. The multicanonical Monte Carlo algorithm has stood up to the promises anticipated; it was used in multicanonical simulations of first-order phase transitions and for spin glass systems.« less

  • Under this DOE funding, the experimental program described in this report now consists of two major approved experiments at Jlab: Investigation of the Spin Dependence of the Effective AN interaction in p Shell (E89-009) which is tentatively scheduled to be completed in the fall of 1999 and Direct measurement of the Lifetime of the Heavy {Lambda}-Hypernuclei at CEBAF (E95-002) which will be run in parasitic mode with E89-009. Also, a new experiment (E97-008) which attempts a directly observation of the spin-orbital splitting in the higher orbits with medium heavy targets was proposed and conditionally approved by Jlab PAC-12 in 1997.more » The condition for this experiment is simply to run E89-009 first and study the best possible energy resolution. The experimental group at Hampton University has played a leadership role in the development and preparation of these experiments. The Principal Investigator (PI) of this grant is spokesperson and acting program coordinator for all three experiments. Establishment of Jlab experiments is the group`s main focus. In addition as originally proposed in the grant proposal, the group also contributed in completing the MEGA experiment at LAMPF. The detector development program established in the NuHEP Center has successfully constructed a large active area Lucite detector which uses a total internal reflection technique as a part of the kaon identification system for the Jlab Hall C SOS spectrometer. Its application in the first two experiments using the (e,e`K) reaction, E91-16 and E93-18 in 1996, has proved its effectiveness to reject the proton background both on-line and off-line. The author continued the program to develop new techniques and equipment associated with the Jlab experiments and possible future experiments at different national laboratories. This new work included developing: (1) a fission fragment detector with excellent timing and position resolution for the lifetime measurement of heavy hypernuclei and (2) new spectrometer systems for strangeness S = {minus}1 or {minus}2 hypernuclear programs at either hadronic facilities such as BNL and KEK (or JHF-50 the new Japanese 50 GeV proton accelerator) or electron facility (mainly CEBAF). The fission chamber has been built and tested by source in lab and it is now under beam test. The optical design of the S2S spectrometer was presented in AGS-2000 Workshop (1996) and recently in JHF98 International Conference.« less