The ATLAS team at Northern Illinois University

ATLAS is one of the two general-purpose detectors designed to study proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of up to 14 TeV to be delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Several members of the Experimental High Energy Physics Group at NIU participate in the ATLAS project. "The ATLAS program at NIU is funded by the US National Science Foundation The team currently consists of

Prof. Jahred Adelman (Deputy Team Leader)
Dr. Elizabeth Brost (Post-doctoral Research Associate),
Tyler Burch (PhD student),
Prof. Dhiman Chakraborty (Team Leader),
Elliot Parrish (PhD student),
Dr. Pawel Klimek (Post-doctoral Research Associate),
Puja Saha (PhD student),
Brianna Stamas (PhD student),
Dr. Yuri Smirnov (Senior Research Scientist),
Prof. Donald Zinger (Electrical Engineer).

Here's a list of former members.

The NIU group is engaged in several critical tasks in operations of the ATLAS detector, its planned upgrade, and high-priority physics analyses. Some of these activities are conducted in close collaboration with colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Detector operation

The NIU team is contributing to the running of the ATLAS experiment through the following tasks:

Operation of the scintillator-tile hadronic calorimeter (TileCal):
- Data Preparation and Performance (DP&P);
- Data Quality Monitoring (DQM);
- Laser Calibration;
- Calibration and Conditions Database (CondDB),
- Management of US-ATLAS TileCal Maintenance and Operations (Level 2).
Commissioning of the Fast TraKer (FTK):
- Run Coordination;
- Algorithms;
- Monitoring;
- Simulation.

Physics Support:

Management of US-ATLAS Physics Support (Level 1).

In the past the team has contributed to

Detector simulation:
- Interaction of particles in the detector volume, using GEANT4;
- Translation of the result of the previous step into recorded data, a.k.a. "digitization";
Tau reconstruction.

In addition to the above activities, team members also take detector and software operation shifts appropriate for their areas of involvement.

Detector upgrade

NIU is responsible for assembling half of all the "LVBox"es needed to supply low-voltage power to the TileCal on-detector electronics for the High-Luminosity (HL-LHC) upgrade of ATLAS.

Physics analysis

The NIU team's main physics interests are in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model through Higgs interactions. Specific topics currently under study include

Searches for di-Higgs production in γγbb and ττbb final states,
Searches Charged Higgs bosons, produced in association with top quarks, and decaying to τν,
Differential distributions of the SM(-like) Higgs boson.

Other involvements

In relation to and extension of the above interests and activities, members of the group have in the past contributed to several other tasks including

Calibration of b-tagging using the ttbar candidate pool,
Optimization of W+(heavy)jets Monte Carlo generator parameters,
Detector performance studies (identification of photons and electrons, b-jets),
Monte Carlo production and validation,
Calibration of forward jets under pile up,
Service on a number of editorial boards,
Co-convenership of US-ATLAS top physics forum,
Coordination of the US-ATLAS Analysis Support Center (ASC) at ANL.

Useful links

For ATLAS collaborators	CERN and LHC pages	For HEP folks (mostly)
ATLAS at work (password-protected)	CERN users' pages	arXiv e-print archive
ATLAS TWiki Portal	CERN phone book	Spires HEP database
ATLAS Operation Task Planner (to book shifts)	CERN document server (CDS)	Spires HEP review literature
ATLAS Glance database	TWiki at CERN	The PDG review of particle physics
ATLAS Collaborative tools	LHC Page 1 (OP Vistars)
US-ATLAS	US-LHC

For anyone interested in particle physics	Related to NIU
The particle adventure - A fun tour of particle physics	NIU ATLAS weekly meetings
interactions.org - Particle physics news and resources	NIU ATLAS GRID Tier 3 facility
CERN - The European center for research in particle physics	NIU ATLAS member registry
LHC - The Large Hadron Collider (accelerator) at CERN	NIU ATLAS electronic logbook
ATLAS - A general-purpose experiment at the LHC	NIU HEP group
CMS - Another general-purpose experiment at the LHC	NICADD

The NIU ATLAS team's research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation

For more information, contact Prof. Dhiman Chakraborty or Prof. Jahred Adelman

Last updated: DC, 2018-01-20.