Paul Bell's Wiki Home

In Brief

• Status: University of Manchester Research Assistant (PH/UAT)
• CERN Phone: 73003
• Location: 32-SB-12

Current and Previous Work

InclusiveElectronsDataSummaries

ATLAS Trigger

From 2007 I have been working on the ATLAS trigger, notably the Trigger Configuration system.

SCT/TRT End-Cap Assembly and Integration

From September 2005 until December 2006 I worked on the assembly and integration of the SCT end-cap C (from 1/12/6 for the University of Manchester). A wiki page for these activities can be found here: EndCapInsertion

The SCT end-cap was completed, tested and integrated to the TRT in October 2006.

Manchester poster on SCT End-cap assembly/integration: manchester_poster_integration.ppt

ATLAS Conditions Data/ATHENA Offline Software

I was one of the first SCT collaborators to start considering the organisation of the SCT conditions data. The initial discussion forum for this topic was set up here.

The 2004 Combined Test Beam provided an opportunity to develop offline code within ATHENA which could access data in the Lisbon implementation of the conditions database. For the SCT, in addition to alignment data, this included the mapping of dead and noisy channels. I introduced two packages, SCT_ConditionsData and SCT_ConditionsAlgs to provide tools to access the data on the status of an SCT channel at the points in the offline software where this information is needed: at the digitization stage of the simulation and at the clusterization stage of the reconstruction.

SCT End-Cap Modules

Between December 2003 and December 2005 I worked as part of the CERN ATLAS SCT group testing the ATLAS SCT end-cap modules produced at the University of Geneva. The CERN-Geneva collaboration, part of the CS cluster, are responsible for around 630 end-cap modules, which are subsequently shipped to Liverpool and Nikhef for assembly to disk.

• Summary of CERN Module testing results: CERNTestSummary.xls (periodically updated)
• Labview program to read and write temperatures to a commercial freezer via a Eurotherm 2416 device with CRC error checker
• The ATLAS SCT: from Module Assembly to Detector Operation submitted to IEEE NSS 2005

Physics: Quartic Gauge Couplings

This is a study of possible anomalous quartic gauge couplings in W plus two photon events at the LHC. I am using a private Monte Carlo generator from O. Eboli et. al. which has been adapted to produce unweighted events in the Les Houches format. A version of the code can be found on hepforge.

My Previous Work

Quartic Gauge Couplings at OPAL

My main Ph.D topic was a study of possible anomalous quartic gauge couplings of the form W-W-gamma-gamma and Z-Z-gamma-gamma in OPAL events containing two photons and missing energy, at centre-of-mass energies 183GeV and above. I also started to study the W-W-gamma-gamma vertex in tri-boson W-gamma-gamma events at ATLAS, using a MC from U. Baur et al. interfaced to ATLFAST. This lead to my current work in this area described above.

• OPAL Physics Note PN510
• Constraints on Anomalous Quartic Gauge Boson Couplings from vv gamma gamma and qq gamma gamma Events at LEP2, published in Phys Rev D70 (2004), with Mark Thomson.

• Anomalous Quartic Gauge Couplings at OPAL, 12th International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS04), Strbske Pleso, Slovakia

• The W-gamma-gamma process at ATLAS (ATLAS Internal Note)

The ATLAS SCT Barrel System Test

For 8 months whilst at CERN in 2001 I worked on the barrel system test for the SCT, an attempt to run as many modules in parallel on a setup as close as possible to the final inner-most SCT barrel. This included the publication of a paper with Joern Grosse-Knetter on the measurement of common mode noise in binary read-out systems.

• Techniques for the Measurement of Common Mode Noise in Binary Read-Out Systems, published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods.

Summary of My Documents

Selected Publications

• Thesis: Anomalous Quartic Gauge Couplings at OPAL and the System Test of the ATLAS Barrel SCT (gzipped pdf)
• Constraints on Anomalous Quartic Gauge Boson Couplings using Acoplanar Photon Pairs at LEP-2, OPAL Physics Note PN510, July 2002
• Constraints on Anomalous Quartic Gauge Boson Couplings from vv gamma gamma and qq gamma gamma Events at LEP2, Phys Rev D70 (2004), with Mark Thomson.
• Techniques for the Measurement of Common Mode Noise in Binary Read-Out Systems, published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods.
• The W-gamma-gamma process at ATLAS (ATLAS Internal Note)
• Anomalous Quartic Gauge Couplings at OPAL, 12th International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS04), Strbske Pleso, Slovakia
• The precision reach of ATLAS for electroweak physics in the low luminosity era, presented at The XXXIXth Rencontres de Moriond, 2004

Talks in indico

• indico search results