Projects for Students

Our group has a number of opportunities for students at various levels. In all cases the students would interact with the physicists and engineers and have the opportunity to learn about particle physics. If you don't know what some of these things mean, that's OK, come and ask questions!

Offline Data Monitoring

Our experiment at Fermilab, D0 http://www-d0.fnal.gov, is currently taking data. We need to write code to accumulate statistics on the performance of the detector and the reconstruction software. An explicit list of tasks is kept here. With a bit of training in C++ and histograming packages it should be possible for an undergraduate to make a real contribution here.

Grid Computing:

There is a project, D0race, to get the Fermilab based D0 software running at remote institutions like Rice. This project involves setting up Linux systems in the right configuration, and is suitable for someone who likes to play with Linux.

Multivariative Analysis Techniques

This project involves further development of analysis tools such as neutral networks and kernel estimation methods. In particular at the moment there is a need for example programs to be written that use D0's d0MA tool. http://www-d0.fnal.gov/~smjt/multiv.html

These tools can be applied in other branches of physics and you may want to try to do so as a project.

Monte Carlo Simulation of the CMS Endcap Muon Trigger

The project is targeted to studies of the EMU trigger using ORCA simulation program. This project is suitable for advanced students with substantial time to work on research. This project requires strong programming skills and familiarity with C++. More information (too much in fact ) can be found at http://cswu.ucdavis.edu/~ptc. General information about the CMS experiment can be found at http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/Welcome.html/