Luc Demortier
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Visiting Scientist Laboratory of Experimental High Energy Physics The Rockefeller University Box 188, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10065-6399 Phone: (212) 327-8824 E-mail: luc.demortier@rockefeller.edu |
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Visiting Scientist Laboratory of Experimental High Energy Physics The Rockefeller University Box 188, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10065-6399 Phone: (212) 327-8824 E-mail: luc.demortier@rockefeller.edu |
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I am a high energy physicist, member of the CDF ("Collider Detector at Fermilab") experiment and ex-member of the CMS ("Compact Muon Solenoid") experiment.
The CDF detector is located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, IL. You can take a fascinating virtual tour of this experiment here... Between October 13, 1985, and September 30, 2011, CDF collected data from proton-antiproton collisions at the highest center-of-mass energy ever attained in America (two trillion electron-volts, or 2 TeV!). I am particularly interested in the properties of the top quark, an elementary particle I helped discover in 1995. Other interests include the search for phenomena not predicted by the standard model of elementary particles.
The CMS detector is located at CERN, the European particle physics center near Geneva, Switzerland. This experiment started taking data in late 2009 and currently prepares to study proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, almost seven times that of the Fermilab accelerator. Here the objective is to investigate a recently discovered new particle now believed to be the long-sought Higgs boson (the 2013 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to François Englert (Belgium) and Peter Higgs (UK) for having proposed this particle in 1964). In addition, CMS also searches for effects that are not predicted by the standard model. Due to the theoretical incompleteness of the latter such effects are expected, although noone knows yet which ones are actually present in nature.
At a more general level, I am interested in how we extract information from our observations, and I want to make sure that we do it right. I have been a member of the CDF Statistics Committee since its creation in the summer of 2000, and was on the CMS Statistics Committee since its start in 2007. The purpose of these committees is to study statistical issues that are relevant for data analysis in high energy physics, provide advice to their respective collaborations, and develop methods for coordinating and combining results between experiments.