As summer comes to an end, last Friday we said goodbye to Joseph Sorel, an undergraduate summer student who joined us from Washington University in St. Louis. Joseph worked with the SUEP team on the WH channel, focusing his efforts on understanding and modeling QCD backgrounds in the search. Like many who have taken on such a challenge, particularly in unconventional signatures, Joseph quickly understood the difficulty and frustrating nature of the task — not a bad introduction to research! Nonetheless, Joseph, as determined as ever, managed to fight through spiky distributions, fake leptons, mis-measured jets, and more, to create a well-defined QCD (meta) control region, which will be of the utmost importance in ensuring we are estimating this background correctly. The summer concluded with a study comparing the QCD Monte Carlo to real data collected by CMS at the LHC during Run 2 in the meta control region he had defined, with initial results looking very promising!
Aside from his hard work on the SUEP analysis, Joseph brought a great sense of humor and a day trading hustle mentality to the office, making his stay here all the more enjoyable. His final act was to gift the SUEP team the finest of coffee mugs, a gift inspired perhaps by the minimum two trips to the coffee machine a day.
Thank you Joseph for a great summer! We wish you all the best in the upcoming year and beyond, and as always, you’re welcome to come back any time.
Pieter started it all, Luca is getting into the photographer move, is all tanks there is a career in this 🙂