HEP experimental group secures R&D funding for future Higgs Factory Detector Development

The experimental high-energy physics (HEP) group (John, Erich, Ken, Rachel, and Elliott) was awarded new funding in FY25 to develop a calorimeter for a future “Higgs Factory”.  It may lead to a large-scale construction project in the future.  UA is one of only a few US institutions that have received Higgs Factory funding for FY25.  

A Higgs Factory is an electron-positron collider designed to produce a large number of Higgs bosons in a very clean environment, which will allow for detailed studies of the properties of these unique particles.  These properties are precisely predicted by our current models, so any measured deviation could point the way towards a deeper understanding of fundamental physics.  

As interesting as a Higgs factory will be, it is still many years in the future. In the meantime, the HEP group is busy at the current leading particle collider, the LHC, where they work on the ATLAS detector.  They are carefully analyzing the data that has been collected by ATLAS so far, looking for hints of particles beyond those currently known, such as additional Higgs-like particles, neutral particles with relatively long lifetimes (so that they leave no trace before reaching the outer sections of ATLAS), and particles that might connect our known particles to the mysterious dark matter.  At the same time, the group is preparing for an upcoming run of the experiment, where the collision rate at the LHC will be about 5 times larger than it is now.  This will require changes to the detector, its electronics, and its trigger system, and smarter analysis methods to handle the larger data sample.  In all of this work the faculty members are supported by research professor Peter Loch, associate research scientist Walter Lampl, and a talented team of Ph.D. students ( Maxwell Cui, George Cheng, Zach Eberle, Colin England, and Nicholas Lopez-Canalas ), postdoctoral researchers (Anindya Ghosh and Jad Sardain), engineers (Kade Gigliotti, Steve Morrison, Sasha Savine, Garrett Scott and Michelle Solis) and undergraduate students (Saif B N R Alrawaished, Diptiman Bora, Thomas Bradstreet, Tugg Ernster, Megan Harrison, Aiden Insall, Andrew Li, Hayden Marchinek, Daniel Smith and Amritaansh Srivastava).