Left to right: Ben, Sasha, David, Ja Kobi, Aimen, Luca, and Pietro.
We say goodbye to Aimen and Ja Kobi, who worked with the PPC for the summer through the MIT Summer Research Program. Hailing from Howard University (Ja Kobi) and Smith College (Aimen), they spent the summer with us in Boston, working with David and the rest of the team on precision measurements using CMS data.
Both worked on different approaches to extracting the strong coupling constant from Drell-Yan measurements. Jakobi focused on the extraction at 13 TeV using the Z boson, where he diagnosed a long-standing issue of spuriously large event weights in the MiNNLO Monte Carlo generator and studied a smoothing procedure developed originally for the W mass measurement that leverages the helicity decomposition of this process. His work has lead to better understanding of this issue, and will hopefully lead to a solution in MiNNLO. Aimen instead took a look at the 5 TeV data collected in 2017, where the lower pile up allows for a more reliable missing energy measurement, meaning the transverse momentum spectrum of the W boson can be more precisely extracted, and from it, the strong coupling constant. This is a completely novel strategy, and she laid down the groundwork for how this analysis will look like.
It wasn’t all hard work and physics and complicated analyses: we were lucky to be enjoying a sunny, warm world cup summer, whose games we diligently screened on the projector in the office, and enjoyed cheering and debating and prognosticating on. The excitement of the competition brought a new fan in Ja Kobi to the sport; Aimen on the other hand, a fútbol aficionado, will forever be remembered for her unassailable support of the greatest player of the game (according to her): CR7. Too bad it wasn’t his year! Beyond the tournament, Aimen and Ja Kobi were joyful additions to daily lunches, full of fun anecdotes and opinions that made their presence enjoyed by many colleagues beyond the group. They also explored the city, like Ja Kobi’s weekly quests for new and delicious food, or Aimen’s world cup viewing all around town, making the most of their time here in Boston.
Their work culminated at a poster session for the MSRP program, where their posters were continuously surrounded by crowds, including the Vice-Chancellor of MIT! The presentations were professional and very well delivered, and they were great representatives of the PPC; indeed, the crowds were no surprise!
With both of Aimen and Jakobi intending to continue their studies of particle physics in graduate school, we hope this is not a goodbye but just a see you later 🙂
Good luck with everything, it was a pleasure to have you be part of the group!