Research Areas

The Standard Model of particle physics provides an astonishingly good description of the fundamental particles and their interactions. Many physicists, however, believe that the Standard Model must be incomplete since so many parameters, including the quark and lepton masses, the quark mixing angles, and the nature of the Higgs sector, are not calculable but instead must be inserted by hand. In addition, recent results from astrophysics indicate that 95% of the content of the universe has not been identified. Physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, grand unification, and superstrings, promises to enable calculation of many of these parameters from fundamental principles. New phenomena predicted in the mass range to be made accessible at the LHC includes a complete elucidation of the Higgs sector and the likely discovery of many new particles - the super-partners of the Standard Model quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. These potential discoveries, and more probably those yet to be imagined, will most likely occur at a hadron collider with a detector that emphasizes high quality lepton detection.

Industry Impact & Relevance

Paul Padley works with others in the T.W. Bonner Nuclear Laboratory on experimental particle physics, participating in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. This experiment is attempting to understand the most basic elements of the universe and the forces that govern their interactions, including studying Higgs bosons, their decay, and searches for new phenomena. Almost all particle physics results coming from the CMS experiment involve the use of machine learning algorithms. Padley’s group is using machine and deep learning methods to the separation of signal from backgrounds for extremely small signal. The ratio of signal to background is on the order of 1:10,000,000,000. This involves code on large cluster, the use of coprocessors (both GPU and FPGA) and custom electronics. Padley’s group is also involved in the design and fabrication of custom electronics used to identify these rare signals, and electronics for extremely fast transmission of these signals to computing clusters. Currently Padley’s engaged in designing electronics for a future upgrade of the experiment that will increase data rates by an order of magnitude.