Research on the ATLAS Experiment at the University of Illinois: Final Report

The goal of particle physics is to understand the Universe at its most fundamental level, including the constituents of matter and their interactions, and the nature of space and time itself. The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature, and their interactions, is one of the most ambitious and enduring of human endeavors. Recent developments in particle physics and cosmology raise the exciting prospect that we are on the threshold of a major step forward in this pursuit. Facilities such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provide a unique window into the subatomic world to pursue this understanding. Mark Neubauer and his research group at the University of Illinois were supported over a nine-month period (07/01/2017 through 03/31/2018) to perform high-energy particle physics research on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The primary focus of this research was to search for physics beyond the standard model through an analysis of high-energy proton-proton collision data from the ATLAS experiment, with an emphasis on the Higgs boson as a sensitive tool for this search, and development of fast particle tracking systems for use the ATLAS trigger system.