Department of Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Connor Moore has been named a Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholar at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Physics Center (LPC) for 2024. This program is aimed to support exceptional graduate student from U.S. Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) institutions. It will fund Connor to spend a year resident at the Fermilab LPC benefiting from the mentorship of resident LPC scientists.
At the LPC in 2024, Moore plans to investigate and implement color-singlet tagging techniques to improve searches for various decays of the Higgs boson. The final goal of this project is to apply color singlet tagging to the decay of the Higgs boson to two gluons (H → gg), though its effects on H → bb searches are also of interest. A full description of his project can be found here.
“I congratulate Connor on being named as one of only two Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholars for 2024. Connor’s achievement is a great credit to the strong high energy physics group," said department chair Prof. Morten Eskildsen.
In 2023, the LPC Graduate Scholars program was renamed in honor of the late Professor Meenakshi Narain who fought for and attained the funds for this program when she was LPC co-coordinator. The LPC serves primarily as a resource and physics analysis hub for several hundred physicists at U.S. institutions in the CMS collaboration. The LPC offers a vibrant community of CMS scientists from U.S. and overseas institutions that play leading roles in analysis of data, in the definition and refinement of physics objects, in detector commissioning and operations, and in the design, and development, and construction of the detector upgrade. There is close and frequent collaboration with the Fermilab theory community.
During 2023, Connor was the recipient of a Fermilab Guest and Visitors program grant the funded frequent trips to the LPC to collaborate with scientists there.
At Notre Dame, Moore is advised by Prof. Kevin Lannon.