Michael D. Hildreth

Associate 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 University Consortium for Linear Collider R&D
The LEP Energy Working Group
 
 

Background:

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 has taken the form of active participation in the LEP Energy Working Group, which performs 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 a novel Energy Spectrometer in order to measure the beam energy at LEP2. My personal pet physics project has been the development of multivariate charm tags for a precise measurement of Rc and Rc(W), the partial widths of the Z and W to charm quarks.

Here at Notre Dame, my research focusses 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, will allow unprecendented access to physics at the TeV scale.  With the data provided by Run II, the mechanism of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking may actually be revealed, either through more precise measurements of the top and W masses, or in direct searches for the Higgs and other New Physics.  My hardware involvement is with the commissioning of the Central Fiber Tracker, whose development and construction had been led by the Notre Dame HEP group. In particular, I am the coordinator of the Central Fiber Tracker Algorithms Group, which creates the tracking algorithms used in the DØ Trigger and the offline reconstruction. An introductory talk on Fiber Tracker software can be found here. An introduction to DØ software can be found at this link.
 

Selected Publications:

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).


Other Links

Official Physics Department Faculty Page
"Private" ND personal page
Family/House Photos


Last updated 3 July, 2002