High-Energy Particle Physics
My first “real” to the fascinating world of particle physics was during the eight weeks that I spent at CERN in 2015 as a summer student. In the months that followed, I learnt even more about the subject, including detection methods, statisticals analyses, and the current state of the art at various schools, workshops and short research projects.
Experiment: ATLAS
For my thesis, I worked with data from the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) experiment at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in CERN, to analyse the decays of top quarks and study the phenomenon of flavour violation in charged leptons.
Experiment: COMPASS
Prior to joining ATLAS, I’d had the opportunity to work in the COMPASS (Common Muon and Proton Apparatus for Structure and Spectroscopy) experiment for a few months, which will soon be succeeded by the COMPASS++/AMBER (Apparatus for Meson and Baryon Experimental Research) experiment. One of the aims of this experiment will be to measure the proton-induced antiproton production cross section, which will help in reducing some of the systematic uncertainties that riddle DM searches.
Experiment: CAST
After my master thesis, I worked for a few months with the CAST (CERN Axion Solar Telescope) collaboration, my first encounter with astroparticle physics. CAST is looking for axions (hypothetical particles that have become one of the leading DM candidates over the past few years) that originate in the Sun. My work was aimed at the computation of an upper limit on the axion-electron coupling constant. In order to achieve this, I made improvements on the solar axion flux calculations, implementing the model described here.