Presenting at WNPPC in Banff
This past February, Carleton University sponsored my attendance of the 60th annual Winter Nuclear Particle Physics Conference (WNPPC) hosted by TRIUMF in Banff Alberta. This is a four-day long conference aimed at early career particle physics graduate students and PhD’s in which students can introduce their work to the particle physics community through presentations or poster sessions. This of course gave me the chance to present my own work, which aims to further our understanding of a rare subset of interactions that involve a process known as “Vector Boson Fusion” (VBF). To order to achieve our goal, Carleton University and I have partnered with the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC, bunches of protons are accelerated to record breaking speeds and steered to collide with one another at energies exceeding 13.6 TeV, the highest ever achieved on earth. The LHC’s largest detector, ATLAS, is able to record the aftermath of these collisions and produce data to be used in analyses just like my own. To study the rare VBF interaction, my research focuses on a decay process occurring within the ATLAS detector known as the electroweak production of a W boson and two particle jets (W+Jets) (Figure 1). Understanding this interaction will implicitly yield information about the VBF process, as the W+Jets final state can only exist if VBF has occurred.

Investigating this interaction is no easy task, as its detection is concealed by many irreducible background processes. To overcome these hurdles, I am developing a novel machine learning based methodology that involves using Boosted Decision Trees (BDT) to efficiently differentiate W+Jets events from background. The BDTs facilitate the work of a fitting algorithm, which can then be used to measure the production rate of W+Jets events with unprecedented precision. This measurement will provide an avenue for testing theories that attempt to push beyond our current model of the universe. Simultaneously, this measurement will pave the way for future measurements of the elusive and recently discovered Higgs Boson, as the Higgs can also be produced via the VBF process. While my work is still in progress, I am optimistic about having results ready for publication in the near future! If you are interested in WNPPC, I highly recommend reaching out to your supervisor and asking if you can attend. Having been able to travel to Banff and present my work on behalf of the Carleton physics team was an incredible experience, and one that I think every early career particle or nuclear physicist should undertake.
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