Northwestern Events Calendar
Nov
10
2025

HEP Seminar: Grace Cummings: "When they go Low, we go Lower: Extending the Reach of Collider Experiments with Low-Level Detector Information"

When: Monday, November 10, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, F160, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Joan West   (847) 491-3645
joan.west@northwestern.edu

Group: Physics and Astronomy High Energy Physics Seminars

Category: Academic

Description:

Even in the time of streaming and industrial big-data, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider still produce data of staggering size and rate. To combat this, low-level detector information is often removed, reduced, or recast; however, the lowest-level detector information holds exciting phase space for both beyond the Standard Model searches and precision measurements. I will present the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment’s most recent search for heavy stable charged particles (HSCPs) in the tracker using dE/dx information. Characterized by anomalously large ionization energy loss, HSCPs are a signature driven search enabled by the inclusion of low-level information in the readout of the silicon pixels and strips. Looking toward future colliders, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) recommendation of a Higgs factory demands precision detectors. To meet this challenge, we are developing high resolution homogenous crystal calorimetry through the measurement and separation of scintillation and Cherenkov light -- information that currently is lost in calorimeters like those in CMS. This talk will review our first proof-of-principle measurements collecting Cherenkov and scintillation light in homogeneous crystals preparing for the precision electromagnetic calorimeter layers of the future.

Grace Cummings, LPC Distinguished Researcher, Fermilab

Host: Adrian Thompson

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