On Physics
Statement of Purpose
One of the major goals of this year outside of further developing my skills as a data scientist is to further develop my skills as a physicist. After graduating with my B.S. in physics and getting into the computer science world, I have kept my love for the subject alive. The following sections will be devoted to notes on my studies in physics as I work through Feynman's path integral text and other graduate level physics work including Landau and Liftshitz Mechanics, and Jackson's E&M. This section will be updated as time permits.
The work listed below was conducted as an undergraduate at FSU doing research on the CMS experiment at CERN.
This thesis searches for new physics at CMS in the form of microscopic black hole production at a minimum threshold of formation of 2.0 TeV. This analysis will examine data from Run II of the LHC with center-of-mass energy sqrt(s)=13 TeV, and an integrated luminosity of 12.9 +- 0.8 fb^-1. This is the first analysis to search for microscopic black hole production with the requirement of two high pT photons in the final state. After modeling backgrounds through low jet multiplicity control regions, no statistically significant excess is found in the signal region.
With pileup becoming an ever increasing concern as the LHC moves towards higher luminosities, new methods for discerning between jets and electromagnetic objects must be considered. The research conducted examines data produced from proton-proton collisions at 𝑠 = 13 TeV with a corresponding integrated luminosity of 600 pb−1 obtained from the CMS detector at the LHC. The purpose of this research is to examine the topology of electromagnetic showers in order to exploit their topological features as an alternative to current isolation techniques. This is the first study to analyze such features at this energy regime.