Chris Meyer

Phone:

+1 (812) 856-4779

Email:

cjmey@iu.edu

Department:

Physics

Campus:

IU Bloomington

I'm currently an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington, researching high-energy physics at the Large Hadron Collider using the ATLAS detector. Previously I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied the properties of Higgs bosons decaying to two photons, and the tracking detector.

I defended my Ph.D. thesis on the Measurement of dijet cross sections in pp collisions at 7 TeV centre-of-mass energy using the ATLAS detector in August 2013 at the University of Chicago. My thesis adviser and mentor was Prof. Mark Oreglia. I received my bachelors from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Spring of 2008 with a B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Mathematics. During my time at Santa Cruz I worked under Prof. Bruce Schumm on ILC track reconstruction, and Prof. Hartmut Sadrozinski on radiation characterization of the ATLAS inner tracker.

Physics Analysis

I'm currently interested in using the Higgs boson to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. As the youngest elementary particle it's properties are still ripe for investigation, hopefully leading to something unexpected and elucidating. I am currently pursuing exotic decays of the Higgs boson (e.g., to Supersymmetric particles or vector-like leptons) and additional Higgs bosons (such as those found in two Higgs doublet models). In the near future I would also like to revisit precision measurements of Higgs boson kinematic cross-sections to set limits on new physics using effective field theory operators.

Detector Upgrade and Operation

I'm currently involved in upgrading the ATLAS charged-particle detector (ITk). In particular, my group works on the monitoring, control and read-out of the ITk-strip sub-detector. In addition, I server as the deputy L2 manager of ITK-strip work for the US ATLAS HL-LHC upgrade.

During my postdoc, I coordinated colleagues from around the world in upgrading and maintaining the data acquisition system of the Transition Radiation Tracker. As the luminosity at the LHC increases, as well as the event trigger rate, the readout system must cope with increased data flow. This is mainly handled by reducing the event size and upgrading the optical readout cards to increase their transfer speed. As a graduate student, I was run coordinator of the Tile Calorimeter at ATLAS, working on repairing the detector during the shutdown between Run-1 and Run-2.