Ashutosh Kotwal | |
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 Ashutosh Kotwal | |
| Born | December 20, 1965 Mumbai, India |
| Occupation | Particle physicist |
Ashutosh Vijay Kotwal (born December 20, 1965) is an American particle physicist of Indian origin. He is the Fritz London Professor of Physics at Duke University, and conducts research in particle physics related to W bosons and the Higgs boson and searches for new particles and forces.
Kotwal was born in Mumbai, India, and attended schools in Calcutta, Lucknow, New Delhi and Mumbai. [1] He then began studying at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 on a full scholarship from the University, and graduated Summa cum Laude with dual degrees in electrical engineering from the Moore School and in economics with finance major from the Wharton School in 1988. He was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar at Penn. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 1995. [1]
After conducting post-doctoral research at Columbia University, Kotwal joined Duke University as a professor in 1999, [1] where he is now the Fritz London Distinguished Professor of Physics [2] and has served as the Director of Particle Physics at the University. [3] Additionally, Kotwal was in charge of a Higgs boson search team as part of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, with the aim of proving the existence of the particle. [3] [4] Kotwal was part of the CERN team that announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. [3] He conducts experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as well as at Fermilab in Chicago. [5] In addition to his research, Kotwal presently coordinates U.S. physicists in the global effort to build a new collider with 7 times higher energy than the LHC, and has collaborated with the Chinese and European groups in this effort. [6]
Kotwal leads the world in measuring the mass of the W boson, which is connected to the Higgs boson, using the data from the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab. In 2012, he analyzed 1 million W boson events to measure its mass to an accuracy of 0.02%, [7] [8] then the world's most precise measurement, which in turn allowed him to predict the mass of the Higgs boson prior to its discovery in 2012. [5] In 2022, he analyzed 4 million W boson events to measure its mass to an accuracy of 0.01%. [9] This measurement is more precise than all previous measurements combined. [9] It is in significant tension with the value expected from the Standard Model of particle physics, and may imply the existence of new principles of physics in nature. [9] In 2023, the ATLAS experiment released an improved measurement for the mass of the W boson, 80,360 ± 16 MeV, which aligned with predictions from the Standard Model. [10] [11]
Kotwal was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, [12] for performing high-precision measurements that helped deduce the mass of the Higgs boson. [13] Kotwal is the recipient of the Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from the US Department of Energy, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. He has received the Dean's Leadership Award from Duke University [14] and is a Fellow of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences, India. [15]
Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions and bosons. There are three generations of fermions, although ordinary matter is made only from the first fermion generation. The first generation consists of up and down quarks which form protons and neutrons, and electrons and electron neutrinos. The three fundamental interactions known to be mediated by bosons are electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction.
The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, east of Batavia, Illinois, and is the second highest energy particle collider ever built, after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. The Tevatron was a synchrotron that accelerated protons and antiprotons in a 6.28 km (3.90 mi) ring to energies of up to 1 TeV, hence its name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made during its active years of 1983–2011.
The top quark, sometimes also referred to as the truth quark, is the most massive of all observed elementary particles. It derives its mass from its coupling to the Higgs Boson. This coupling is very close to unity; in the Standard Model of particle physics, it is the largest (strongest) coupling at the scale of the weak interactions and above. The top quark was discovered in 1995 by the CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are
W+
,
W−
, and
Z0
. The
W±
bosons have either a positive or negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge and are each other's antiparticles. The
Z0
boson is electrically neutral and is its own antiparticle. The three particles each have a spin of 1. The
W±
bosons have a magnetic moment, but the
Z0
has none. All three of these particles are very short-lived, with a half-life of about 3×10−25 s. Their experimental discovery was pivotal in establishing what is now called the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration studies high energy particle collisions from the Tevatron, the world's former highest-energy particle accelerator. The goal is to discover the identity and properties of the particles that make up the universe and to understand the forces and interactions between those particles.
The DØ experiment was a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. DØ was one of two major experiments located at the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The Tevatron was the world's highest-energy accelerator from 1983 until 2009, when its energy was surpassed by the Large Hadron Collider. The DØ experiment stopped taking data in 2011, when the Tevatron shut down, but data analysis is still ongoing. The DØ detector is preserved in Fermilab's DØ Assembly Building as part of a historical exhibit for public tours.
ZZ dibosons are rare pairs of Z bosons. They were first observed by the experiments at the Large Electron–Positron Collider. The first observation in a hadron collider was made by the scientists of DØ collaboration at Fermilab.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.
The search for the Higgs boson was a 40-year effort by physicists to prove the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, first theorised in the 1960s. The Higgs boson was the last unobserved fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery was described as being the "ultimate verification" of the Standard Model. In March 2013, the Higgs boson was officially confirmed to exist.
Guido Tonelli is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa (Italy) and a CERN visiting scientist.
Young-Kee Kim is a South Korea-born American physicist and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. She is chair of the Department of Physics at the university.
Peter Jenni, is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is (co-)author of about 1000 publications in scientific journals.
The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) is a proposed Chinese electron positron collider for experimenting on the Higgs boson. It would be the world's largest particle accelerator with a circumference of 100 kilometres (62 mi).
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders, such as the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Tevatron, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FCC project is considering three scenarios for collision types: FCC-hh, for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, FCC-ee, for electron-positron collisions, and FCC-eh, for electron-hadron collisions.
Tulika Bose is a Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose research focuses on developing triggers for experimental searches of new phenomena in high energy physics. Bose is a leader within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, a CERN collaboration famous for its experimental observation of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Teresa Rodrigo Anoro was a Spanish scientist who worked in particle physics. She worked at CERN, Fermilab and the Instituto de Física de Cantabria and was professor at the University of Cantabria. Whilst at CERN, Rodrigo worked on the Compact Muon Solenoid and research for the Higgs boson.
Bradley Cox is an American physicist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Physics and the founder of the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Virginia.
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss Experimental Particle Physicist. He is a Professor of Physics at Drew University, a Visiting Experimental Scientist at Fermilab, and a Guest Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered as the largest experiment in the history of physical science. At present, he is doing research at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago. Fermilab is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.
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