The PPC had the pleasure to host Andrea Siddartha Maria as a visiting Master’s student from ETH Zurich for the warm Boston months of April through October of this year.
Andrea worked on the search for dark photons using CMS data from the LHC’s Run 3, in the dilepton channel. He developed multivariate techniques to classify signal from other backgrounds to enhance the sensitivity of the search, and on modeling the complicated background.
He also estimated the systematic uncertainties of the classifier, the trigger scale factors, conducted tests to study the possible biases of the fitting models, and constructed a toy study to validate the robustness of the fitting method.
This impressive effort, mentored by our postdoc Zhangqier Wang who worked also on the Run 2 search for dark photons, has resulted in the analysis reaching the internal review stage, from where it will be made public in time for the winter conferences.
After many lagrangian-filled whiteboards, late-night debugging sessions fighting against the formidable hydra of the HEP physicist — one head of Combine (well, being Combine), one of Minuit not converging, one of Slurm queues filling up just-when-I-needed-them, one of HTCondor jobs crashing, and so on — and many coffee breaks to fuel the fire, we are very happy to congratulate him on taking this analysis to the finish line, submitting his thesis, and earning his Master’s degree!
Work aside, Andrea maximized his time here in the Boston area and beyond like few before him. Locally, he immersed himself in MIT, Boston, and American culture: football, baseball, basketball, free food mailing-lists, the famous Muddy Charles, the Boston brewery scene, grill-outs at the park — truly the whole nine yards. Beyond city borders, he traveled all across New England, from the White Mountains to Cape Cod, and further, to New York City and Washington DC. Andrea has also left us personally with many fond memories, of summer jogs along the Charles River, the Esplanade, the Harvard buildings, of warm Friday evenings at the Muddy, of espresso breaks in the Lourie room, and many many more, collected in the few months he was here.
We are delighted that Andrea will continue his exciting path in particle physics as a PhD student at Amsterdam’s prestigious NIKHEF, where he will join the ATLAS experiment to work on the flagship analysis that aims to measure the Higgs self-coupling from the data collected during the LHC’s Run 3. Of course, on a personal note, his departure feels bitter-sweet, not only because of our feelings of friendly competition with our fellow researchers at ATLAS, but because we have to say goodbye (for now) to a great friend and colleague.
Buona fortuna, Andrea! We hope to see you at many future cross-experiment conferences 🙂
— Pietro & Luca on behalf of the PPC
