Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Co-lead the CMS Experiment team in its discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Keywords

Dark matter, Higgs boson properties, physics beyond the standard model, precision measurements

Current Research Interest

Since its inception about 100 years ago particle physics has made amazing progress in understanding what matter is and what forces act on it. Nevertheless, there are a number of fundamental and seemingly simple questions we do not yet know the answer to. With the Higgs boson found and thus understanding how elementary particles acquire their mass, a new fundamental questions has started to inspire me in my research. From astrophysical data it is well known that ordinary visible matter in the universe accounts for only one fifth of its total matter. This means four fifth are not visible to us and are therefore referred to as dark matter. I am searching for dark matter with the CMS experiment. Ib the most classical scenario dark matter is expected to leave missing energy signatures in our data as it escapes the collision without being caught by our detector, but there are also more complex signatures which do not rely on missing energy but can be equally powerful to track down the existence of the dark sector.

Other things

I love my family, listen to music, read books and play hockey (on ice).