By Dr. Laura Reina, Physics Department

 

	Ben Thayer

With the imminence of the first physics proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN (Geneva,Switzerland), the world of particle physics stands at the verge of a "golden age" in exploring the universe at the smallest of distance scales. Such explorations hope to shed light on fundamental problems such as the origin of Dark Matter in the universe, the possible existence of new forces and extra spatial dimensions, and the origin of mass in fundamental particles such as electrons and the quarks.

To aid in these endeavors, starting in 2007 the National Science Foundation has announced the Large Hadron Collider Theory Initiative (LHC-TI) Fellowships. These prestigious Fellowships assist selected young theoretical particle physicists, either graduate students or postdocs, with a competitive salary and extra funds for research, computing and travel needs, for a maximum of two years. Awardees are selected by a national committee of renowned particle physicists on the basis of their scientific merits and the relevance of their scientific work to the physics of the LHC.

In 2009 three Graduate Student and two Postdoc Fellowships were awarded nationwide. One of the recipients of the Graduate Student LHC-TI Fellowship is Benjamin Thayer, from Florida State University's Department of Physics. Working under the guidance of Prof. Laura Reina, Thayer's research seeks to answer some of these fundamental problems by improving the precision of theoretical calculations for particularly important particle reactions at the LHC, such as the production of heavy quarks (known as bottom and top quarks) with pseudoscalar particles, known to appear in several extensions of the Standard Model. Utilizing some recently proposed mathematical techniques, Thayer hopes to develop and test more efficient methods for calculating particle physics observables than the traditional techniques used presently. If successful, the new techniques will help significantly improve the precision of particle reaction cross sections, and thereby help physicists at the LHC better distinguish between signals of "new physics" from background Standard Model processes.