Thomas Ferguson

Professor, Physics

Education

Research

Research interests are in experimental high-energy particle physics and, in particular, the use of electron-positron and proton-proton colliding beam accelerators. Our group is a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which has constructed a massive detector for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a 14 TeV proton-proton colliding beam accelerator, which has been constructed at the European accelerator center, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. To find out more, visit the CMS web page at: http://cms.cern.ch/and CERN's web page at: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ 

The Carnegie Mellon high-energy physics group designed and built 160,000 channels of fast electronics for the CMS forward muon cathode-strip chambers. You can find out more about these electronics at our web site: http://www-hep.phys.cmu.edu/cms/ 

All the electronics and the muon chambers have been installed in the experiment and are ready for data-taking. When the LHC turns on in the fall of 2009, it will be the highest-energy accelerator in the world, exceeding the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab by a factor of 7 in energy. With the CMS detector, we hope to discover not only the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, but entirely new families of particles predicted by various theories.

Selected Publications

• S. Chatrchyan et al., Measurement of the elliptic anisotropy of charged particles produced in PbPb collisions at √s̅_NN=2.76 TeV, Physical Review C 87, 014902 (2013)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., Search for heavy, top-like quark pair production in the dilepton final state in pp collisions at √s̅ = 7 TeV, Physics Letters B 716, 103-121 (2012)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., Search for pair produced fourth-generation up-type quarks in pp collisions at with a lepton in the final state, Physics Letters B 718, 307-328 (2012)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC, Physics Letters B 716, 30-61 (2012)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., Study of high-p_T charged particle suppression in PbPb compared to pp collisions at √s̅_NN=2.76 TeV, The European Physical Journal C 72, 1945 (2012)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., Observation of a New Ξ_b Baryon, Physical Review Letters 108, 252002 (2012)
• S. Chatrchyan et al., J/ψ and ψ(2S) production in pp collisions at √s̅ = 7 Tev, Journal of High Energy Physics 2012, 11 (2012)
• V. Khachatryan et al., Upsilon production cross section in pp collisions at √s̅=7  TeV, Physical Review D 83, 112004 (2011)
• CMS Collaboration: Performance of the CMS cathode strip chambers with cosmic rays, Journal of Instrumentation 5, T03018-T03018 (2010)
• CMS Collaboration: S. Chatrchyan et al., The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, Journal of Instrumentation 3, S08004-S08004 (2008)