Physics
Office Hours: Email me.
Research Interests:
Education:
B.A. Cambridge University, U.K. Ph.D. Columbia University
Biography:
Tulika Bose received her Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics from Columbia University in 2006. Her post-doctoral research at Brown University focused on direct searches for new phenomena at the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. She has also extensively worked on trigger and data acquisition for both D0 and CMS and is currently serving as the convener of the Trigger Menu Integration group at CMS. She is an author of numerous publications in refereed journals and is actively involved in preparations to extract physics from CMS using early LHC data.
In the news:
Research Descriptions:
The Compact Muon Solenoid
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a 15 kiloton detector designed to search for new physics at an unprecedented distance scale of 10-19 m at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CMS experiment will probe such tiny distance scales with proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV with first collisions expected in 2007. The detector consists of 220 square meters of silicon pixels and strips (80 million channels) for precision charged particle tracking, 75k lead-tungsten crystals for precision electron and photon measurement, a highly segmentated1000-ton brass hadron-calorimeter plus a quartz-fiber forward calorimeter to measure jets from quark and gluon scattering and energy balance, all surrounded by a precision muon chambers embedded in the return yoke of the magnet. The GHz collision rate at the LHC presents enormous technical challenges on the design of readout electronics due to the intense radiation environment and the high speed at which millions of channels of data must be processed. The Boston University group, which includes not only our excellent staff in the Electronics Design Facility but also several experts resident at CERN, has a leadership role in calorimeter electronics and software for physics analysis of jets and missing energy. The group has designed and built the data concentrator, a sophisticated piece of digital electronics based on modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to read out the hadron calorimeter. Arjan Heering has led the custom design of the 18-channel hybrid photo-diode used to convert scintillation light from the calorimeter into electrical signals. We have also designed the electronics to feed calorimeter signals into the muon trigger to greatly reduce the backgrounds in the online event selection. The Boston University group is also taking a leadership role in physics analysis of jets and missing energy. This work is closely tied to a number of dedicated runs in the test beam at CERN (coordinated by D. Lazic). While the exact physics to appear at the LHC is unknown, we have a strong belief that it will involve measurement of muons and quark jets. The timing of the CMS project presents an opportunity for new graduate students not seen since the discovery of the W and Z at CERN nearly 25 years ago.
The DØ Experiment
The DØ experiment studies proton-antiproton collisions at the world’s highest energy accelerator, the Fermilab Tevatron. These collisions release energy equivalent to 2000 times the proton mass. The DØ detector is a large, highly sophisticated instrument that measures the fragments of these collisions and allows scientists to study the structure of matter at these high energies. According to our current understanding, the basic constituents of matter are quarks and leptons. All the matter surrounding us is made of the lightest quarks, called up and down, and the lightest leptons, the electron and its neutrino. However there exist two additional families of quarks and leptons with identical properties, except much larger masses. The heaviest of the quarks, the "top" quark, was discovered in 1995 by the DØ and CDF collaborations at Fermilab. The top quark turned out to have an extraordinarily large mass, approximately the same as an entire gold atom. Particle physicists believe that its further study will provide clues to the origins of mass. The members of the Boston University DØ group were actively involved in the discovery of the top quark and the study of the carrier of the weak force, the "W boson". The group is now participating in the second data-taking run which began in 2001 and will continue until 2009. During this run, thousands of top quarks will be created, allowing a detailed study of the properties of this intriguing particle. The data from the Fermilab Tevatron will also provide the best opportunity until the LHC begins operation to find the Higgs boson and new physics beyond the standard model. The Boston University group has taken leadership roles in the construction of the muon detector system and the silicon microstrip tracker, the development of algorithms to identify bottom quarks and muons, and the "Top and Higgs Physics" analysis group. The group has designed and built a significant fraction of the electronics for the muon system trigger, the silicon track trigger, and the central fiber tracker trigger. The group’s physics interests center on the top quark and the search for new particles and forces beyond the standard model.