UA Physics Alumnus Gustavs Kehris defended his PhD thesis at Harvard!

Congratulations to Dr.  Gustavs Kehris, who successfully defended his PhD thesis at Harvard. His thesis defense was impressive and well-received.

Gustavs got his Physics Bachelor Degree at UA in 2019.  He was the Physics Outstanding Senior that year.  For his undergraduate study, he worked with Prof. John Rutherfoord and Prof. Jan Rafelski on various topics.  After his graduation, he continued his PhD study at Harvard.  He worked with prof. John Huth, who is the US ATLAS Lifetime Achievement Award winner this year and Donner Professor of Science.  

Gustavs worked on probing lepton–quark resonances in proton–proton collisions with the LHC ATLAS detector, focusing on the muon and b-jet flavor channel. From the naturalness perspective of high-energy physics, lepton–quark resonances would represent a hallmark signature of a leptoquark—a hypothetical particle interpreted as a TeV-scale condensate arising from gauge-unified theories.  Among searches for heavy resonances in proton collisions, searches for lepton–quark resonances, however, are relatively scarce. Cross-generational lepton–quark resonances have received even less experimental attention. Gustavs worked on one such under-represented resonance: the muon and b-jet resonance. He played a key role in the recently published ATLAS analysis recently posted to arxiv [1] and submitted for publication in JHEP. The analysis leveraged the full Run 2 and partial Run 3 datasets, and found agreement with Standard Model predictions while extending benchmark leptoquark exclusion limits for couplings above ~1. It was also among the first ATLAS physics analyses to incorporate the 2022 and 2023 datasets.

During his PhD, Gustavs also contributed to the development of the Trigger Processor for the New Small Wheel upgrade of the ATLAS muon spectrometer system, which was installed in 2021.

Besides his interest in fast moving particles, Gustavs used to try to propel himself around a track as fast as he could:  https://arizonawildcats.com/news/2019/1/17/track-and-field-gustavs-kehr….   In 2018 he managed to run 800m at a pace of 2.383E-8 times the speed of light and be ranked 989th in the world for an entire week.  

Please join us in congratulating Gustavs for this achievement!