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CoEPP ANNUAL REPORT ANNUAL CoEPP 2015 ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale ANNUAL REPORT 2015 ANNUAL www.coepp.org.au REPORT 16 Centre nodes Monash node Adelaide node School of Physics and Astronomy 1st floor, Physics Building Clayton Campus North Terrace Campus Monash University VIC 3800 The University of Adelaide SA 5005 T +61 3 9902 4981 T +61 8 8313 3533 E [email protected] E [email protected] Sydney node Melbourne node School of Physics, Building A28 David Caro Building (Bld 192) Camperdown Campus Parkville Campus The University of Sydney NSW 2006 The University of Melbourne VIC 3010 T +61 2 9351 2482 T +61 3 8344 5428 E [email protected] E [email protected] Partner institutions CONTENTS 3 ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS 44 OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT 4 ABOUT 48 PUBLICATIONS 5 About CoEPP 49 Refereed journal articles 6 Director’s report 51 ATLAS collaboration 7 Chair’s report 55 Belle collaboration 8 International Advisory Committee’s report 56 CDF collaboration 9 Structure and governance 57 Refereed conference proceedings 11 Personnel 58 Conference presentations 61 CoEPP annual workshop 18 RESEARCH 19 Overview 64 PERFORMANCE 20 Higgs experimental program 65 Prizes and awards 23 Higgs theory program 66 Media report 25 Neutrino theory program 67 Centre-recognised leadership 26 Precision tests of the Standard Model 70 Key performance indicators 28 Dark matter 72 Financial statements 31 Searching for supersymmetry 74 Financial summary 34 Research computing 78 LOOKING AHEAD 35 Running and upgrading the experiment 36 Collaborations 79 Activity plan 82 Case study: Searching for new physics with 38 CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS computer vision 39 2016 CoEPP annual workshop and summer school in Torquay 40 SUSY 2016 41 INPC 2016 43 CosPA 2016 1 ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR PARTICLE PHYSICS AT THE TERASCALE 2 ANNUAL REPORT ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS AIDA An Inclusive Dilepton Analysis ATLAS A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS CERN European Council for Nuclear Research CMS Compact Muon Solenoid CoEPP ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale CP charge parity DM dark matter fb femtobarn GAMBIT Global And Modular Beyond the Standard Model Inference Tool GeV giga-electron volt ICHEP International Conference on High Energy Physics IUPAP International Union of Pure and Applied Physics KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation LHC Large Hadron Collider MSSM minimal supersymmetric Standard Model NMSSM next-to-minimal supersymmetric Standard Model QCD quantum chromodynamics SM Standard Model of particle physics SUSY supersymmetry TeV tera-electron volt WIMP weakly interacting massive particle WLCG Worldwide LHC Computing Grid 3 ABOUT The ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) is a collaborative research venture between the universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Monash. ANNUAL REPORT About CoEPP The Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) is a collaborative research venture between the universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Monash. CoEPP fosters links between experimental and theoretical particle physics, links Australian research to significant international research Mission centres, establishes strong Australian grid and cloud computing • To enable young Australian scientists direct access to this most expertise, and further develops accelerator technologies in Australia. exciting field of endeavour on a footing where they will be competitive with their international peers. Vision • To inspire a new generation of young Australians to pursue careers in science and technology. The Centre will exploit a once-in-a-generation opportunity for • To lead Australia in the field of high-energy physics research, fundamental scientific research in Australia through its involvement and to establish national awareness, pride and longevity in this with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This includes field through international collaboration, excellence in research discovering new physical laws, recreating and investigating matter training and opportunity for engagement. under conditions that have not existed since the big bang, and producing and studying dark matter in the laboratory. The Centre will lead the nation in pursuing knowledge of the fundamental laws of particle physics through a deepening engagement in the international field of high-energy particle physics. 5 ABOUT ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR PARTICLE PHYSICS AT THE TERASCALE Director’s report 2016 marks CoEPP’s sixth year of operation and has been our most productive year to date. We began the year with our biggest ever CoEPP scientific workshop in Torquay, Victoria. More than 150 representatives from Australia and overseas participated. We have expanded the national particle physics program and have an unprecedented number of research students. CoEPP organised major international conferences in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and cemented collaborative exchange relationships with Fermilab in the United States and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China. The LHC operated beautifully at 13 TeV energy and has delivered Fermilab, the United States major high-energy physics laboratory, a lot more data than was anticipated. More than 40 petabytes and CoEPP recently signed an international Cooperative Research of data have streamed through the Worldwide LHC Computing and Development Agreement, which is a significant step in forging Grid since the LHC restart, and our researchers have been busy active partnerships to tackle shared challenges in physics research. analysing these data. The focus now is on precision measurements The agreement will initially facilitate exchanges in both directions of the Higgs boson, as well as looking at new ways of searching for of researchers, technical staff and students to work on a range supersymmetry (SUSY) and the potential for dark matter production. of activities, including advanced theoretical physics, precision CoEPP researchers have a strong reputation in various Higgs decay measurement techniques, advanced research computation methods, analyses, including the Higgs decaying to a pair of tau leptons, the underground experimentation and accelerator R&D. We also signed Higgs to WW channel, Higgs production in association with top a collaboration agreement with IHEP. Progress continues with the quark pairs in leptonic final states as well as Higgs decaying into a SuperKEKB project at KEK in Japan. Both positron and electron pair of photons, and rare and exotic Higgs searches. beams were first circulated in February. CoEPP experimentalists are active in pursuing the future program of the Belle II experiment at Our theorists have made important contributions to Higgs studies the unique and important SuperKEKB. The next round of tests is with development of strategies to measure Higgs boson couplings, scheduled for mid-2018, with the commencement of the program model building, and looking at cosmological and astrophysical with a completed detector due from early 2019. manifestations of Higgs physics. Theorists continue their research on dark matter with important contributions to the collider With all the very positive results from our current program and the search through the mono-X program, as well as indirect detection acclaim received, it was with great disappointment we learned of techniques, and model building. A key legacy of CoEPP has been the failure in our bid to win funding in the 2017 round of ARC Centre theorist–experimentalist connection, which marks us as innovators in funding. With the unanimous judgement of CoEPP’s success as an the international context. ARC Centre and the recognised quality of our work, this result is hard to understand. However, we will continue as a Centre beyond 2017 The highly successful pre-SUSY Workshop and SUSY 2016 and are actively following the many constructive ideas proposed to Conference took place in Melbourne in early July. Thanks to a team seek avenues for additional funding to continue CoEPP operations effort between CoEPP Monash and Melbourne, the conference had beyond the current ARC funding period. Your ongoing commitment more than 270 participants, 220 abstracts submissions, 31 plenary and support are much appreciated. They will empower us to talks and an intriguing public lecture by Professor John Ellis on dark develop these ideas into concrete strategies and plans to maintain matter and SUSY. Talks explored the unknown, and probed some and expand particle physics research in Australia. I look forward to new ideas in theoretical and phenomenological aspects of SUSY. further developments and will keep you informed as they evolve. Experimental results and future capabilities tempered the theorists’ extravagance with a dash of reality! In September, the Adelaide node hosted the International Conference on Nuclear Physics 2016, together with the Australian National University and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. The large-scale conference attracted international delegates from many laboratories including TRIUMF, JLab, IUPAP and RIKEN. A diverse range of talks reviewed and discussed recent progress and development in nuclear physics Professor Geoffrey Taylor research, including the discovery of element 113 at RIKEN. Centre Director CoEPP Sydney ran the 13th International Symposium on Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics. Latest results and ideas in the areas of particle physics, cosmology