Taus and the Trigger for Discovery at ATLAS

This five year grant allowed Yale Professor Sarah Demers and her students and postdocs to contribute to the ATLAS Experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. We worked on a particular mode of the Higgs Boson decay, contributing to the discovery of this particle as well as measuring the particle's properties. We also performed a 'first of its kind' measurement at a hadron collider in the measurement of tau polarization, which increased the sensitivity of ATLAS in a number of exciting ways, both for making measurements of known particles and for hunting for new ones. We also contributed to the tau trigger - the real-time selection that chooses data that includes the signature of the tau lepton. Four PhD students in the Yale Physics Department received their PhDs during the term of this grant, with at least partial support from the grant.