Announcement of 2014-2015 U.S. ATLAS Scholars

Each year, the U.S. ATLAS Analysis Support Centers (ASCs) at Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory host distinguished research scholars in a program to foster physics collaboration and enhance U.S. contributions to the ATLAS physics program. The U.S. ATLAS Scholars play an important role in the life of the ASCs as outside guests who bring new ideas and projects. The selected scholars have proposed to use the resources available at an ASC to make major contributions to ATLAS in the areas of physics analysis but also play a leading role in organizing ASC and U.S. ATLAS analysis activities.

The U.S. ATLAS Scholars for 2014-2015 are listed below with their selected Analysis Support Center and their proposed projects.

• Jahred Adelman (Northern Illinois University) will work at the Argonne ASC on searches for Higgs boson pair production. This effort includes several channels, including the decays to photons + b-jets. Jahred will also work on improving dijet mass resolution and triggers for hh signatures.
• Kevin Black (Boston University) will work at the Argonne ASC on searches for heavy quark production and on the Region of Interest Builder. This effort will focus on developing more model-independent searches and identifying boosted jet topologies.
• Walter Hopkins (University of Oregon) will work at the Brookhaven ASC on searches for direct stop production and on calorimeter clustering for trigger algorithms. His focus will be on the boosted signal region for the 0-lepton final state, complementing other third generation searches.
• Shih-Chieh Hsu (University of Washington) will work at the Berkeley ASC on searches for dark matter using the hadronic mono-W/Z/H plus large missing ET signature. This effort, which depends on boosted jets, includes optimization of the jet pruning performance and the development of new boson tagging tools.
• Benjamin Kaplan (New York University) will work at the Brookhaven ASC on searches for new physics in final states with Higgs bosons and on multi-object triggers. His focus will include supersymmetric particle production with subsequent cascade decays to Higgs bosons. He will also work with BNL experts on e/gamma and jet triggers.
• Xiaowen Lei (University of Arizona) will work at the Berkeley ASC on searches for vector-like quarks, including boosted jet tagging in those searches for the first time. She will also focus with experts on adding systematic uncertainty handling to the ATLAS analysis software tools so that the job submissions are streamlined.
• Peter Loch (University of Arizona) will work at the Berkeley ASC on searches for dynamic dark matter in hadronic states with large missing ET. He will also work on the commissioning of jet tools and missing ET measurements with early 13 TeV.
• Ryan Reece (University of California, Santa Cruz) will work at the Berkeley ASC on tau reconstruction and performance studies, with applications to ditau signatures in exotics and Higgs. He will also work to commission improved tau ID algorithms and fake rate measurements.
• Jacob Searcy (University of Michigan) will work at the Brookhaven ASC on studies of vector boson scattering. He will collaborate with other experts to introduce new signatures to improve signal-to-background ratios and to interpret results in terms of Higgs boson couplings.

We congratulate all of the scholars on their selection and look forward to collaborating with them on their activities.