Mayda Marie Velasco | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1966 |
| Nationality | Puerto Rican |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Puerto Rico (BS), 1988) Northwestern University (Ph.D), 1995) |
| Awards | Alfred P. Sloan Fellow CERN Achievement Award Woodrow Wilson Fellowship |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Particle physics |
| Institutions | Northwestern University |
| Thesis | A Study of the G(2) Spin Structure Function and the A(2) Nucleon-Virtual Photon Asymmetry Through the Polarized Deep Inelastic Muon-Proton Scattering (1995) |
| Doctoral advisor | Donald Miller and Ralph Segel |
| Website | Northwestern University |
| Notes | |
Director of COFI | |
Mayda Velasco is a physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She works in experimental particle physics and is a leading member of the CMS Collaboration at the CERN LHC. She founded COFI and is its first director. [1] She is a pioneer in the physics potential of photon colliders. [2]
Velasco went to high school at Academia Maria Reina in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras) and attended graduate school in physics at Northwestern University where she obtained her PhD in 1995 with Donald Miller and Ralph Segel as advisors.
Velasco's research career spans a wide range within experimental particle physics. She obtained her Ph.D. by making the first measurement of the spin structure function g2(x) using data collected by the Spin Muon Collaboration. She became a CERN Post-Doctoral Fellow in 1996 with Heinrich Wahl as her advisor. At CERN, she joined the NA48 experiment Collaboration. This experiment made precision measurements of neutral kaons especially as regards CP violation. It also investigated rare kaon decays. [3] Velasco formed her own collaboration to perform the NA59 experiment at CERN. This experiment demonstrated the channeling of high energy particles in bent crystals and studied the production of circularly-polarized high-energy photons. [4] This topic connected well with her pioneering work in the physics potential of photon colliders, [2] which she advocated at the Snowmass Meeting in 2001. Following that meeting, she promoted the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) accelerator at CERN. [5]
Velasco joined the faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University in 1999. At that time she joined the Main injector oscillation neutrino search (MINOS) Collaboration to study neutrino oscillations. She left MINOS to join the CMS Collaboration at CERN - one of the two general-purpose experiments at the CERN LHC—where she continues to play a leadership role. Her work has an important impact on the current understanding of the Higgs boson: she spearheaded the rare Z+photon decay channel which, in principle, can distinguish the standard model Higgs boson from those beyond the standard model. [6]
Velasco was awarded a Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2002. She also received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and she is a recipient of the CERN Achievement Award. She holds the UNESCO Chair on Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Physics Professorship at Northwestern University since 2018. [7] This position was established in support and recognition of COFI, which Velasco founded in 2014.
Velasco serves as a member [8] of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) that advises the United States Department of Energy.
Velasco was given the Northwestern University Dean's Award for Diversity in 2015. [9]
Velasco founded the Colegio de Física Fundamental e Interdiciplinaria de las Ámericas (COFI) [1] in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2014. COFI hosts full-time students and scientists from Puerto Rico, the continental United States, and abroad to collaborate on emerging fundamental science projects. [1] The institute also provides advance training programs and public lectures. She is its first General Director.
In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. The Standard Model presently recognizes seventeen distinct particles—twelve fermions and five bosons. As a consequence of flavor and color combinations and antimatter, the fermions and bosons are known to have 48 and 13 variations, respectively. Among the 61 elementary particles embraced by the Standard Model number: electrons and other leptons, quarks, and the fundamental bosons. Subatomic particles such as protons or neutrons, which contain two or more elementary particles, are known as composite particles.
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles, such as an electron colliding with a positron to produce two photons. The total energy and momentum of the initial pair are conserved in the process and distributed among a set of other particles in the final state. Antiparticles have exactly opposite additive quantum numbers from particles, so the sums of all quantum numbers of such an original pair are zero. Hence, any set of particles may be produced whose total quantum numbers are also zero as long as conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and conservation of spin are obeyed.
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 across 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.
Jonathan Richard "John" Ellis is a British-Swiss theoretical physicist.
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.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 50 countries.
Sau Lan Wu is a Chinese American particle physicist and the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She made important contributions towards the discovery of the J/psi particle, which provided experimental evidence for the existence of the charm quark, and the gluon, the vector boson of the strong force in the Standard Model of physics. Recently, her team located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), using data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was part of the international effort in the discovery of a boson consistent with the Higgs boson.
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 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.
Victoria Jane Martin is a Scottish physicist who is Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the ATLAS experiment on the Higgs boson.
]
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.
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.
Oliver Buchmueller is a scientist and professor of physics at the Faculty of Natural Science, Imperial College London. Buchmueller is presently serving as one of the lead scientists on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the principal investigator of the Atom Interferometer Observatory and Network and also one of the lead authors at Atomic Experiment for Dark Matter and Gravity Exploration in Space (AEDGE). Previously he has been associated with the ALEPH experiment at CERN’s LEP collider and the BaBar experiment at SLAC. Buchmueller was among the group of scientists responsible for the discovery of Higgs Boson particle at the LHC, CERN and later in the scientific exploration to find the traces of dark matter through the LHC.
The Scattering and Neutrino Detector (SND) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN, is an experiment built for the detection of the collider neutrinos. The primary goal of SND is to measure the p+p --> +X process and search for the feebly interacting particles. It will be operational from 2022, during the LHC-Run 3 (2022-2024). SND will be installed in an empty tunnel- TI18 that links the LHC and Super Proton Synchrotron, 480m away from the ATLAS experiment interaction point in the fast forward region and along the beam collision axis.
