Michael D. Hildreth

Professor, Experimental Particle Physics

Coordinates:

E-mail: mikeh@removethis.undhep.hep.nd.edu

Address: Nieuwland Science Hall 414

Phone: (574) 63[1-6458]

Mailing Address: Department of Physics

225 Nieuwland Science Hall

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, IN 46556

Current Projects:

I am a member of:	The Notre Dame High Energy Physics Group
	The DØ Experiment at Fermilab
	The CMS Experiment at the LHC
	The University Consortium for Linear Collider R&D

Background:

A.B. Physics, Princeton University, 1988
Ph.D. Physics, Stanford University, 1995
CERN Fellowship, 1995-1997
CERN Staff Physicist, 1997-2000
Assistant Professor, 2000-2006
Associate Professor, 2006-2012
Professor, 2012-present
DoE Outstanding Junior Investigator, 2002
Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, 2003
Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2008
Thomas P. Madden Award as the Outstanding First Year Instructor, 2010

Research Interests:

My research thus far has paired an interest in precision Electroweak measurements with an active involvement in understanding the accelerator issues that must be addressed in order to make these measurements possible. At LEP, this involvement took the form of active participation in the LEP Energy Working Group, which performed the crucial task of determining the LEP beam energy with sufficient accuracy to allow extremely precise measurements of the Z and W boson masses and the Z lineshape parameters. I have worked on understanding the effects of the huge energy loss from synchrotron radiation on the collision energies, and proposed and built a novel Energy Spectrometer in order to measure the beam energy at LEP2. My personal pet physics project was the development of multivariate charm tags for a precise measurement of R_c and R_c(W), the partial widths of the Z and W to charm quarks.

Here at Notre Dame, my research focuses in part on the data from the Tevatron Run II taken with the DØ Experiment. The Tevatron luminosity and energy upgrades, with the additional capabilities of the Run II version of the DØ detector, has allowed unprecendented access to physics at the TeV scale. With my students and postdocs, I have studied the mechanism of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking through more precise measurements of the top and W masses, and in direct searches for the Higgs boson. My hardware involvement has been with the commissioning of the Central Fiber Tracker, whose development and construction was led by the Notre Dame HEP group. In particular, I (still) am the coordinator of the Central Fiber Tracker Algorithms Group, which creates the tracking algorithms used in the DØ Trigger and the offline reconstruction. I was involved in the simulation and design effort of the RunIIb Level 1 Trigger upgrades. I have also served as a convener of the DØ Tracking Group and overall Offline Software Coordinator for the experiment

More recently, physics data is being taken at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Notre Dame is part of the CMS experiment and has played an important role in building and commissioning the HCal and ECal sub-detectors. My work has concentrated on detector simulation, particularly the simulation of pileup in the various sub-detectors. I have created a suite of software that allows backgrounds, pileup, and noise from real collision events to be mixed with Monte Carlo hard scatter events for a more realistic simulation. I am currently a convener of the CMS Full Simulation Group. My students are currently working on electron/photon and tau triggers, with the aim of using these signatures to search for New Physics in the up-coming running.

I also have a small accelerator instrumentation project running at the ATF2 beamline at KEK. Here, we are attempting to show that we can monitor the mechanical drift of high-precision Beam Position Monitors with sufficient accuracy that we can correct for motion at the 10nm level. This level of precision will be necessary to build an energy spectrometer with sufficient resolution at a future e⁺e^- linear collider.

Selected Publications:

MEASUREMENT OF THE W BOSON MASS.
V. M. Abazov et al., (DØ Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 141801 (2009)

DETERMINATION OF THE BENDING FIELD INTEGRAL OF THE LEP SPECTROMETER DIPOLE.
R. Chritin et al., Nucl. Inst. Meth. A 545, 31 (2005).

CALIBRATION OF CENTRE-OF-MASS ENERGIES AT LEP 2 FOR A PRECISE MEASUREMENT OF THE W BOSON MASS.
R. Assmann et al., (LEP Energy Working Group) Eur. Phys. J. C 39, 253 (2005).

B PHYSICS AT DØ.
M.D. Hildreth et al., (DØ Collaboration), , Eur. Phys. J. C 33, S192-S194 (2004).

THE RUN IIB TRIGGER UPGRADE FOR THE DØ EXPERIMENT.
M Abolins, et al ., IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 51 340-344 (2004).

PRECISE DETERMINATION OF THE Z RESONANCE PARAMETERS AT LEP: 'ZEDOMETRY'.
G. Abbiendi et al. (OPAL Collaboration), Eur. Phys. J. C 19 587 (2001).

MEASUREMENT OF THE W MASS AND WIDTH IN e⁺e^- COLLISIONS AT 183 GeV.
G. Abbiendi et al. (OPAL Collaboration), Phys.Lett. B453 138 (1999).

EVALUATION OF THE LEP CENTER-OF-MASS ENERGY ABOVE THE W PAIR PRODUCTION THRESHOLD.
A. Blondel et al. (LEP Energy Working Group), Eur. Phys. J. C11 573 (1999).

CALIBRATION OF CENTER-OF-MASS ENERGIES AT LEP-1 FOR PRECISE MEASUREMENTS OF Z PROPERTIES.
R. Assmann et al. (LEP Energy Working Group), Eur. Phys. J. C6 187 (1999).

A TEST OF THE FLAVOR INDEPENDENCE OF STRONG INTERACTIONS.
K. Abe et al. (SLD Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D53 2271 (1996).

MEASUREMENT OF THE LEFT-RIGHT FORWARD-BACKWARD ASYMMETRY FOR CHARM QUARKS WITH D*⁺ AND D⁺ MESONS.
K. Abe et al. (SLD Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 3609 (1995).