The Higgs discovery and my doctorate
Co-author of the ATLAS Higgs discovery paper, with doctoral research on Higgs-like resonances at the Large Hadron Collider.
Part of the Higgs discovery
I contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson as a member of the ATLAS Collaboration and a co-author of its 2012 discovery paper. My affiliation at the time was Università di Napoli Federico II and INFN Napoli. This was a collective scientific achievement, built through the work of the experiment’s researchers, engineers and technical teams. My own research focused on Higgs analyses, combining detector data, reconstruction, software and statistical reasoning.
What I investigated
My doctoral research studied Higgs-like resonances in a channel containing two leptons and two quarks, written H → ZZ → ℓℓqq. A central contribution was the study of the low-mass region using ATLAS data recorded in 2011 at 7 TeV. I completed the thesis at the University of Naples Federico II in 2013, supervised by Mariagrazia Alviggi and Francesco Conventi.
Exhibit 1DiagramRead left to right
The channel I searched
Two Z bosons from one heavy state: one identified cleanly through a pair of leptons, the other through two jets of hadrons, where backgrounds are large and the comparison with prediction decides what has been seen.
Exhibit 2PeopleCredit where the work was shared
Who supervised the work
- Francesco ConventiDoctoral supervisor, Università di Napoli Federico II and INFN, 2010 to 2013.
Reading a collision
A particle search starts with what the detector can measure. The task is to reconstruct the products of a collision and ask whether their distribution contains a signal consistent with the process being studied. Many other processes can produce similar observations.
This makes the comparison between data and prediction essential. An apparent feature must be examined together with backgrounds, detector effects and uncertainty. The strength of a result depends on how well those alternatives have been tested.
Exhibit 3TimelineFilled points are my milestones; hollow points are the context they sit in
The years around the thesis
- 2011Data taking at 7 TeVThe low-mass search in my thesis used the 2011 dataset.
- 2012Co-author of the ATLAS discovery paperHiggs-boson discovery as part of the ATLAS Collaboration, while affiliated with Naples and INFN.Source
- 2013Thesis defended in NapoliUniversità di Napoli Federico II, fundamental and applied physics.Source
A question that continued
The Higgs discovery in 2012 gave this research a new context. My thesis also considered the search for heavier Higgs-like states. It belongs to the collective work of ATLAS, with a specific analysis documented in the dissertation.
Exhibit 4ResourcesOpen the thing itself, not a description of it