After the discovery of a Higgs-like boson around 125 GeV it has become important to measure the properties of the new state. I am determining the expected sensitivity of our measurement of the particle's spin in the LHC run 2 dataset, and how proposed upgrades to CMS will affect the sensitivity.

My project is focused on the possible measurement of the trilinear Higgs self-coupling at 14 TeV. This will be done through an analysis of diHiggs production. I will be looking at the potential of analyzing the HH -> bbgammagamma decay channel in order to determine a significant value for the self-coupling.

HH → bbγγ decay

With the upgrade of the CMS detector in 2020 to a luminosity of 14 TeV there will be the potential to measure the self-coupling constant of the Higgs boson, which has applications to measuring the Higgs potential. In order to better understand the significance of various backgrounds for di-Higgs events we will characterize the potential background channels for the HH → bbγγ decay. My three areas of interest will be events containing two fake photons produced with two real bottom jets, two mistagged charm jets, or two mistagged light jets. By determining the efficiency rates for these various faking events and normalizing by their cross sections, we may weight events in these background channels and produce the expected distributions and number of events for each channel.

Four Dimensional Shower Profiling for Time-of-Flight-Based Vertex Reconstruction

Following the planned Phase II upgrade to the CMS detector, high event pile-up will be common. Associating detections with their proper vertices will be a challenging task, so it has been proposed to use timing systems to help in vertex reconstruction. In order to implement a time-based vertex reconstruction algorithm, it is necessary to define time of flight in a statistically precise and meaningful way. The current scope of my project is to investigate the time and space characteristics of hits in order to assign a proper time of flight to each detection in ECAL, and to see what additional difficulties arise in high pile-up.

SUSY Searches

I am currently working on generating collision events for the Simplified Model Spectra (SMS) models T1ttbb and T2tb with the objective of narrowing the search for SUSY particles. His primary work involves the optimization of code utilized by event generating and analysis software, such as MadGraph and Pythia, and the interpretation of incoming data to ensure that observations correspond with the pertinent models."