Research at the Large Hadron Collider

We perform research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. There are a large number of tasks that can be done over the academic year and in the summertime (the latter are paid internships that involve travel to CERN or the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, IL).

There are hardware-based tasks, where you will participate in construction and quality assurance tasks while we build the next generation of detectors at the LHC, or study the detector performance of the current detectors already installed.

There are software-based tasks, which may include machine-learning based reconstruction and identification techniques, calibration of energy and directions of particles in our detector, or other tasks.

There are analysis-based tasks, which may include analysis of collisions to understand the tiny quantum-mechanical interactions that occur at the LHC, including things like the Higgs boson and the top quark, or even more exotic things like dark matter.

The project outcomes have varied in the past. Previous students have: 

• Constructed part of the LHC detectors. 
• Written papers detailing work on analysis of LHC data. 
• Given presentation at major international research conferences. 
• Spent summers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, CERN, and Cornell participating in the CMS Project.

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Chicago, IL

Read all of the introductory material: 

• The Standard Model
• The Higgs Boson
• The Large Hadron Collider
• CMS
• Dark Matter
• Physics

Work through all of the introductory tutorials:

• TensorFlow
• Github: Scikit-Hep-Examples

Take a look at additional, helpful (but not required) resources: 

• Introduction to Elementary Particles
• Elementary Particle Physics: An Intuitive Introduction
• "Looking Inside Jets: An Introduction to Jet Substructure and Boosted-Object Phenomenology"
• "Jet Substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: A Review of Recent Advances"
• "Jet Substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: Experimental Review"

Physics