My current research is focused on observing the production of a W-boson in association with two photons. This process is predicted in the Standard Model but has not yet been observed. There are a number of ways the Standard Model allows for Wγγ production, but the (arguably) most interesting process is the following:

which requires a quartic gauge coupling between two W-bosons and two photons. With the dataset ATLAS collects between 2015 and 2018, there should be a sufficiently large number of recorded events to observe the low production cross-section Wγγ process.

From 2012 - 2017, my research focused on searches for hadronic, long-lived neutral particles. Most searches for physics beyond the standard model involve looking for some combination of standard model particles produced at the interaction point. However, there is also the possibility that new physics might look somewhat different.

Instead of a new particle being created in the proton-proton collision and immediately decaying into standard model particles, it is possible that these new particles could travel through the detector, not interacting with any of the material, before decaying into observable particles. These decays would leave a unique and striking signature in the detector: a burst of activity far away from the collision, with nothing in between.

For the most part, I focused on reconstructing and identifying possible displaced decays in the muon spectrometer. This work has led to three peer-reviewed publications and one conference proceedings: