Caleb Smith

My research is in experimental high energy physics. I work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which is one of the four main detectors for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. CMS is a general purpose experiment that seeks to measure the properties and fundamental particles and search for evidence of new fundamental particles.

The known fundamental particles and the forces that govern their interaction are described by the standard model of particle physics. However, there are many phenomena not described by the standard model like dark matter, which is providing gravitational force that holds galaxies together, and dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the universe. CMS is searching for evidence of new particles that could be manifestations of dark matter. There are a variety of new physics theories, and supersymmetry (SUSY) is one theory that could explain dark matter as well as other open questions in particle physics. Our CMS group at KU is using CMS data to search for evidence of supersymmetric particles in compressed models. Compressed supersymmetric models have small mass differences between certain supersymmetric particles. The final states for these compressed models have unique challenges as many final state particles have low momentum, making them challenging to reconstruct and identify. For the analysis, we are using recursive jigsaw reconstruction (RJR) and various particle identification methods to explore many possible finals states that have 0, 1, 2, or 3 charged leptons.

The CMS tracker will be replaced during the Phase 2 upgrade. Our research group at KU is helping with the upgrade of the CMS inner tracker, which will be a new pixel detector. This pixel detector will have on-detector readout chips that will send data over electrical and optical links to off-detector electronics. At KU, we are designing, producing, and testing electrical links (e-links) that will be used for command and data transmission between the readout chips and port cards, which will be located near the edge of the inner tracker.