Research – Anyes Taffard Home Page

Taffard’s research interests lie in the understanding of the fundamentals building blocks of matter and their interactions. High Energy Physics (HEP) offers some of the most exciting experimental opportunities to expand our understanding and discover new physics. This is an exciting time for HEP. In 2009, CERN Large Hadron Collider started operating at a center-of-mass energy seven times higher than the previous largest accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab. Since 2015, the LHC collides proton-proton at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The increase in center-of-mass energy opens up the reach for exciting new discoveries. This is once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, especially for undergraduate and graduate students, to take part in this intriguing exploration at the energy frontier.

Taffard is particularly interested in the search for new physics phenomena that could shed light on the origin of the particle masses, the discrepancy between the amount of matter and antimatter in the universe, and the unification of the four forces (gravity, strong, weak, electromagnetic) into a Grand Unified Theory. Since the turn-on of the CERN LHC in 2010, Taffard’s research efforts is focuses on the ATLAS experiment. Previously, she performs her research on CDF, at the Tevatron and DELPHI at LEP.

bul-pho-2009-064 — The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Also shown are the locations of the ATLAS and CMS experiments which are located 100m underground. Their pictures have been magnified.

The construction of the ATLAS detector was completed in summer 2008. The first data taking (Run-I) occurred between 2010 and 2012, and was marked by the discovery of the Higgs boson.

In 2013-2014, the LHC was repaired to bring the center of mass to 13 TeV. The ATLAS experiment is now recording the Run-II dataset.
The LHC is currently on a major shutdown which will permit the ATLAS experiment to perform the first major upgrade of its detector. Data taking will resume in 2022. One of these upgrade is the installation of the New Small Wheel (NSW), which replaces the existing Small Wheel of the muon system. The next major shutdown will be from 2025 to mid-2027, and a large fraction of the ATLAS detector will be again upgraded to be able to sustain the very high luminosity regime of the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), where ~85% of the integrated luminosity will be delivered. See here the full LHC schedule.

Here are some really cool facts about the ATLAS detector. The Department of Energy has a web site about the science at the LHC and US contributions to the LHC. Here you may found a introduction to the LHC project for non-scientists and also a very serious report from the Daily News.

The UCI ATLAS group was involved in the construction of the Cathode Strip Chamber (CSC), which are parts of the ATLAS muon Small Wheel, and currently works on its maintenance and operation. The group has a long standing involvement in the ATLAS TDAQ (Trigger and Data Acquisition System) and Data Quality monitoring, which ensures that ATLAS is recording quality data for analyses. Taffard was Data Quality Convener in 2015-2016.

DAQ system for the NSW. Here we are using a mini micro-mega chamber with the front-end readout chips.

Taffard’s group is involved in the New Small Wheel upgrade, in particular the trigger simulation, calibration and DAQ of the Front-End electronics. They are responsible for the infrastructure at CERN (BB5) to install and commission the readout and trigger electronics chain of the NSW Micromegas wedges. One of the UCI project scientist is NSW run coordinator, focusing on the work related to install the NSW in that ATLAS experiment and operate this new detector.

Taffard’s group in also involved in two trigger projects for the HL-LHC upgrade in ~2025. They are working on the design and construction of a new muon trigger system (L0MDT) which will use the information from MDT chambers to reduce the muon trigger’s rates and improve their purity. They are also working on the hardware track trigger (HTT), which will allow for fast track reconstruction at the trigger level. For both project, they work on developing algorithms, implement then on firmware that is run on FPGAs, and test on custom hardware platforms. They are also involve in ATLAS software and computing, working on improving ATLAS reconstruction software and make use of heterogenous computer farm hosting GPUs, FPGAs.

Taffard’s group is involved in many analyses, focusing on searches for new physics such as: diHiggs, Supersymmerty (SUSY), Lepton Flavor violation, diboson resonance in Vector Boson Fusion. See Publications page for a list of selected publications. In both trigger upgrade projects and analyses, we use machine learning to improve analysis sensitivity or trigger performances.

It’s a very exciting time !!!
Check the Opportunities webpage if you are interested in getting involved in research.