Physics

The UChicago ATLAS group pursues exciting physics using groundbreaking techniques. Our graduate students and postdoctoral researchers earn international recognition for leading these high-impact analyses.

Our diverse physics efforts capitalize on our unique strengths in ATLAS instrumentation, Monte Carlo simulation, and software. We play active roles understanding the recorded data, triggers, and physics objects used in analysis. This includes jets, missing transverse momentum, flavor tagging, and tracking.

Landmark measurements

We perform uncharted measurements of the Standard Model and foundational properties of the Higgs boson. Measuring the Higgs self-coupling is central for elucidating electroweak symmetry breaking.

We have led precise measurements of vector bosons with jets, dijet cross-sections, unique W production emitted from a high momentum quark, and W+/W- charge asymmetry as tests of parton distributions.

Pioneering searches

Using the Higgs boson and hadronic jets to probe new physics is a focal point of our searches for exotic resonances, dark matter, dark photons, and dynamics that could modify the Higgs self-coupling. We develop novel techniques for tracking inside jets, tagging boosted objects such as top quarks, gauge and Higgs bosons to enable these efforts.

We have also pioneered several efforts to search for unconventional signatures of new physics, including long-lived particles, motivated by Supersymmetric and dark sector scenarios. We push the boundaries of our detector's capabilities, and often reimagine how the detector can be used, to search for these hard to find signatures.