Tetiana Berger-Hryn'ova: winner of an ERC Consolidator grant
Tetiana Berger-Hryn'ova, leader the ATLAS experiment group at LAPP, has just been awarded a Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the DITTO project. The DITTO project searches for deviations between the standard model of particle physics and experimental observations in events with two leptons. The objective? Pinpoint signs of a New Phenomena at the very high energies.
The Large Hadron Collider is known for the discovery of the Higgs boson. But this powerful machine also seeks to find new phenomena, not described by the standard model of particle physics which could shed light on the nature of dark matter or matter/antimatter asymmetry. In vain for the moment. One of the reasons could be that the LHC, as powerful as it is... is not yet powerful enough and these new phenomena could be at energies beyond its reach. Should we give up probing the existence of these new phenomena at the LHC? No, because these new high-energy processes will leave traces at lower energies, almost imperceptibly modifying some observables that are measurable at the LHC. Extremely precise measurements are crucial to identify these changes
Precise measurements of events with two leptons
This is what Tetiana Berger-Hryn'ova, physicist and leader of the ATLAS group at the Laboratory of Particle Physics at Annecy (LAPP), aims to probe in the events with two leptons. Indeed, in some models of new phenomena it will lead to an increase in number of dilepton events at high energies, while the Standard Model predicts a constant decrease. The objective of the DITTO project is thus to discover the first signs of this rebound, the first discrepancies in the number of dilepton events predicted by the Standard Model and those effectively observed. For this, it is necessary identify interesting events with two leptons among the billions of proton-proton collisions which ATLAS detector sees every second and record as many as possible for the future analyses. The ERC Consolidator grant will allow Tetiana Berger-Hryn'ova to set up a larger research team toanalyze new data being collected at the moment and to compare it with the Standard Model predictions. It brings a unique opportunity to improve ability of the ATLAS experiment to detectand characterize these interesting events and to use the acquired knowledge to lay, perhaps, the first milestones of a greater understanding of the laws of our Universe.