Research

I conduct research in the field of High Energy Physics (HEP)

I primarily work on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Search for new physics beyond the Standard Model:

The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics is the theory that describes the elementary particles and their interactions through the fundamental forces (3 of them). However, there are several shortcomings of the SM, such as its incompleteness in terms of explaining gravitational interactions, matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, dark matter, masses of neutrinos etc. This has led to the proposal of models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM), that seek to fulfil the shortcomings of the SM. Several BSM models have been proposed, some of which predict the presence of new undiscovered particles such as the theory of supersymmetry, however no direct experimental evidence supporting such models has been found till date. The search for BSM physics is one of the most active areas of research in the field of high energy physics.

The datasets collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC provide a prime hunting ground for searching for BSM physics. I have been actively involved in BSM searches, including using model independent approaches to search for new physics and using novel techniques such as the reconstruction of displaced vertices, that give access to search for potentially undiscovered particles with relatively large lifetimes.

The search for BSM physics, including exotic new particles, dark matter candidates and supersymmetry is a major research interest for me.

Higgs physics:

Following the discovery of the Higgs boson by the CMS and ATLAS Experiments in 2012, studies and measurements of the Higgs boson have become a prime area of research. I have been involved in such studies, with the measurements of the Higgs boson in the diphoton decay channel and the search for the production of the Higgs boson in association with a pair of top quarks (ttH), leading to the first experimental observation of this process.

Higgs physics continues to be one of my main areas of research interest. Measurements of the top quark Yukawa coupling, that will be a major physics result to come out of CMS in the future, and also to study the CP nature of the Higgs boson to probe any possible interference from BSM effects. Along with this, the as yet unobserved tH production mode is also interesting to probe for effects of BSM phenomena affecting the sign of the top-Higgs coupling and the analysis strategy would be quite similar to that used for the ttH mode.

Particle physics detector development:

Particle physics detectors are the most important tools for research in high energy physics and they are some of the most advanced machines built by mankind. I have worked on the Drift Tube (DT) muon detector system of CMS, and more recently have been working on the development of the High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCal) for the planned upgrade of the CMS experiment.

Along with the construction and operations of the detectors themselves, reconstruction of the particles detected plays a very important role in particle physics experiments. The use of state of the art techniques, such as using Machine Learning techniques including advanced Neural Networks, is crucial for the reconstruction of particles in the complex environment created by particle collisions at the LHC.

Both, particle detector R&D and working on reconstruction techniques are an area of focus for my research work.