Project@CERN

 

For a specific topic in a selected subject-area here specified, a short stay at CERN is foreseen. The project will be jump-started with an initial two-week stay at CERN and will be further developed in LIP-Lisbon. While at CERN, the student will have the opportunity to visit the experimental site and to experience the environment of the ongoing data taking operations. The results obtained shall be presented at the final summer students' workshop in September at LIP.

 

Subject area:
A special type of interactions at the CERN LHC involves the collision of two photons, producing leptons, top quarks, W bosons, and other final states. These photon-photon interactions are a promising way to search for new effects beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. A new detector at the CMS experiment, called PPS, is designed to identify these interactions by detecting the forward going protons they leave behind. The PPS detector has already recorded a large amount of data in 13 TeV collisions, to be used for these studies.

 

Topic:
Exclusive top quark pair production. Although top quark pairs are mostly produced by the scattering of the proton constituents, in rare occasions they can be produced by elastic scattering of the protons. This exclusive production mode may be used to search for anomalous couplings of the top quarks, e.g. to photons. In this project the student will search for this rare production mode in >70/fb of data collected by CMS at 13 TeV.

 

Eligibility:
Academic year should be third or higher. Some initial familiarity with high energy physics (for example, through course work, participation in past editions of the LIP internship program or in other programs in the field) is valued.

 

Application:
Students who may wish to be considered for this project should indicate so in the registration form (here), where the specific project ('Exclusive top quark pair production') should be included in the ordered list of preferred projects. Additional materials shall be requested for this application, which include a terse CV and motivation letter. An interview may be later arranged for short-listed applicants.

Deadline: May 15.