Aran Garcia-Bellido wins Department of Energy's Early Career Research Award

Assistant professor Aran Garcia-Bellido has been selected for this year Department of Energy's Early Career Research Award. The selection of this prestigious award by the Department of Energy is based on peer review by outside scientific experts. A total of 65 scientists from a pool of 1,150 university- and national laboratory-based applicants received this award this year. The program provides funds to young professors to develop the proposed research during five years.

The title of Prof. Garcia-Bellido's proposal is "Precision physics and searches with top and bottom quarks". The goals of the proposal are (1) to measure with high precision how top quarks interact with bottom quarks in the Standard Model of particle physics, and (2) to search for new heavy particles that decay into top and bottom quarks. Prof. Garcia-Bellido proposes to use the large available data from Fermilab's Tevatron proton‐antiproton collider and the high‐statistics data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proton‐proton collider to comprehensively exploit the different production mechanisms and conditions in the two colliders. Final states with top and bottom quarks provide a promising avenue to look for physics beyond the Standard Model because top quarks can couple easily with new heavier particles or exhibit anomalous couplings. Additionally, this project aims to develop new electronics to read out the light signals from the hadronic calorimeter detector in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment.