Chuyuan Liu Wins Pake Fellowship
By Ben Panko
Physics Ph.D. candidate Chuyuan Liu has received the George E. and Marjorie S. Pake Fellowship in Physics.
The fellowship, which supports a Department of Physics graduate student, is named after George E. Pake, a physicist who studied nuclear magnetic resonance and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and his wife Marjorie. After spending time as a professor and provost at Washington University of St. Louis, where he conducted research that contributed to the rise of magnetic resonance imaging, Pake served as the founding director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation that supported pioneering research into computing.
"Our research is to measure how the Higgs boson interacts with W and Z bosons using the proton-proton collision data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector on the Large Hadron Collider," Liu said of his work in the lab of Assistant Professor of Physics John Alison.
"He's looking at this in a way that hasn't been studied before," Alison said. "I'm really proud of him."
That new work is based on a process called VHH production, Liu explained, and seeks to measure the interaction strength between the bosons.
"If there is a discrepancy between our result and the Standard Model prediction, we may be able to find a clue to a new physics theory," he said, such as an unconfirmed new particle.
Liu said the Pake Fellowship will allow him to continue to focus on his work within the CMS experiment. Outside of his research, he enjoys listening to music and exploring.