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Alexei N. SafonovAssistant Professor of PhysicsEmail: safonov(at)tamu.edu Phone: 979-845-1479 Fax: 979-845-2590 Office: 428 ENPH Building (Office Wing) |
Electronic version of my 09/17/2008 Physics Department Colloquium talk “LHC: The New Era Has Just Started”:
Fancy slide show version with videos (may be slow and will not work with some browsers)
Research:
I work in the area of experimental high energy physics. This area of physics embarks on experimental understanding of the nature, its smallest building blocks and forces that keep these blocks together. In big picture terms, we are trying to understand how is the world around us built and why. To answer these fundamental questions we build large accelerators, machines that accelerate beams of particles (typically electrons or protons or their anti-matter twins, positrons and anti-protons) to enormous energies and collide them. We then study the results of such collisions and use that information to look for new fundamental particles and study the forces that arise between the particles as they interact. In the past 50 years most major discoveries in particle physics came from collider experiments and remain to be on of the most promising techniques for studying high energy physics.
Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles is the most
up-to-date model that describes the world around us and its building blocks.
While Standard Model has been very successful in describing the data (note that
it has been continuously modified to accommodate for the new knowledge), there
are various unanswered questions. One of them is the still undiscovered higgs
boson, a particle that is responsible for giving mass to all other particles.
Higgs boson is a fundamental part of SM and the whole SM will break into pieces
if it does not exist, although it is possible that some other mechanism can be
effectively doing the job of the higgs boson. Large part of my research is
dedicated to searches for higgs boson. I perform these searches at the Tevatron
collider at Fermilab (near
Apart from Higgs searches, I am interested in a wide variety of theoretically likely other undiscovered particles that could help explain other mysteries related to the world of particle physics. One example is the dark matter that comprises a huge part of the mass of the Universe and we still have no clue as to what this dark matter is. One promising idea comes from the so called SuperSymmetry (SUSY) model that predicts presence of a large spectrum of new particles including a heavy stable neutral particle that could be the explanation for the mysterious dark matter. Incidentally, SUSY also helps to understand why fundamental forces present in nature (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational) are so different in their strength (gravitation is by far the weakest) and provides a simple and elegant mechanism for introducing the so-called symmetry breaking associated with the yet illusive higgs boson. There are several other interesting models (e.g. little higgs or extra dimensions) that also predict a variety of new particles, such as heavy bosons that we call Z-prime because they are similar to the Z-boson discovered in the 80th by the LEP collider at CERN. This particle would decay (among other decay channels) into pairs of leptons and I am working on a search for Z-prime decays into muons.
Apart from physics analyses, we also work on creating tools
for performing these studies (which is essentially software development, but
requires a lot of physics knowledge), building hardware and electronics that
are used in collecting and interpreting the data that will be used in making
new discoveries. I work on these projects with a group of people who are the
main driving force behind many of our studies: Dr.
Here, you can find my CV and a list of publications.
Awards:
Outstanding Junior Investigator – 2007 by the
Teaching:
Physics-218, see the web-page