About me

I am a AAAS Fellow at the Department of Energy. I will write more about that when I leave. In my previous career I was a particle physicist, most recently a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University. I was working to understand if the dynamics governing the particles and forces we enjoy today are stable or metastable. Everything from the structure of the periodic table to extended objects able to support themselves against the pull of gravity rely on the current vacuum value of the Higgs field.

To the best of our experimental and theoretical precision, physics rests just over the edge of absolute stability. Perhaps a few small errors or missing degrees of freedom are to blame. It is also possible our current physics was acquired dynamically in the early universe via unknown mechanisms and that these dynamics will resume in the far future. Our best hope of addressing this question experimentally is to precisely pin down the masses of the two heaviest known particles, the Higgs boson and top quark, and to verify that the Higgs field self interaction has the expected form.

The form of the Higgs field self interaction determines the amount of energy stored in the Higgs field when it is perturbed and how that energy is released. We perturb the Higgs field in the laboratory using high energy proton collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In rare collisions we expect to dump enough energy (a few hundred times the proton rest mass energy) into the Higgs field and produce a pair of Higgs bosons. The rate of such collisions provides a direct measurement of the form of the Higgs field self interaction.

Such collisions almost always result in complicated shower of radiation and particles which presents a series of technical challenges for reconstructing the collision process. A measurement of the rate of Higgs boson pair production will further rely on a model of the expected background rate of collisions producing nearly identical final states through different processes. For such a measurement to be possible at the LHC methods will have to be developed to produce high dimensional models of such background processes and validate them at sub-percent level precision.