Andrew Leister

Andrew Leister's picture
Graduate Student
260 Whitney Ave. New Haven, CT 06511

CV

As a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, my work revolves around doing research with the tau lepton, a charged third-generation particle that has unique characteristics and is coupled to several theorized undiscovered particles. The tau will hopefully give new insight to advance our understanding of particle physics beyond the current standard model. So far I have done much work with tau data quality monitoring. This involves closely monitoring information with taus in LHC collisions in order to determine if issues with the ATLAS detector are negatively affecting the data generated. In addition to pointing out flaws discovered, I must also ensure that only good quality data is used for physics analyses. I am also beginning work on tau identification, namely the high energy electron veto. As the energy of the LHC collisions increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish taus from other particles such as electrons. The electron veto, the algorithm used to make this distinction, must be consistently improved to allow for accurate data in higher energy collisions. This is particularly important for heavier particles, such as the neutral gauge boson Z’.