Elementary Particles and Fields and String Theory Commons^™

Session E-4: What's Up With The Higgs Boson? Teaching Particle Physics In High School, Peter Dong

Professional Learning Day

Best-selling books, popular PBS specials, and multi-billion-dollar machines all attest to the fascination with particle physics - including many teenagers. Physics and physical science classes can capitalize on this interest by talking about high-profile results, such as last summer's Higgs Boson Discovery. This session will answer some basic questions about contemporary particle physics and suggest some ideas for lessons and projects in particle physics.

Ads/Cft In String Theory And M-Theory, Daniel R. Gulotta '03

Doctoral Dissertations

The AdS/CFT correspondence is a powerful tool that can help shed light on the relationship between geometry and field theory.

The first part of this thesis will focus on the construction of theories dual to Type IIB string theory on AdS₅ x Y⁵, where Y⁵ is a toric Sasaki-Einstein manifold. This thesis will introduce a consistency condition called "proper ordering" and demonstrate that it is equivalent to several other previously known consistency conditions. It will then give an efficient algorithm that produces a consistent field theory for any toric Sasaki-Einstein Y⁵.

The second part …

A Measurement Of The Top Quark Mass With A Matrix Element Method, Adam Paul Gibson '96

Doctoral Dissertations

We present a measurement of the mass of the top quark. Our event sample is selected from proton-antiproton collisions, at 1.96 TeV center-of-mass energy, observed with the CDF detector at Fermilab's Tevatron. We consider a 318 pb^-1 dataset collected between March 2002 and August 2004. We select events that contain one energetic lepton, large missing transverse energy, exactly four energetic jets, and at least one displaced vertex b tag. Our analysis uses leading-order tt and background matrix elements along with parameterized parton showering to construct event-by-event likelihoods as a function of top quark mass. From the 63 events observed …

Searches For Neutral Higgs Bosons In Quark-Antiquark Tau-Antitau Final States Using The Opal Detector At Lep, James Andrew Hocker '91

Doctoral Dissertations

Searches for neutral Higgs bosons have been performed with the OPAL detector at LEP. Approximately 170 /pb of e+e- collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 189 GeV have been used to search for the SM process e+e- to HZ as well as for the processes e+e- to hZ and e+e- to hA which occur in extended Higgs theories. The searches are sensitive to final states containing quarks and tau leptons, for which an artificial neural network for the identification of tau leptons was designed. The results have been combined with OPAL searches for other final states to obtain a …