NEW: Grant for a masters student to develop a HEP data-theory analysis framework
One-year long FCT grant for a masters student
We offer a grant for a 12-month long masters student project, to be performed within the framework of the FCT project “MUSIQ – Methods for Understanding Strong Interactions with Quarkonia”, with LIP as host institute.
Quarkonia are mesons composed of charm or beauty quark-antiquark pairs and their production is of primary interest for the understanding of the mechanisms behind bound state (hadron) formation in QCD.
The student will work in a small research team with more than 10 years of experience in studies of the production of quarkonium states (charmonium and bottomonium families, both S- and P-wave states) in high-energy proton-proton, proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions.
One of the main goals of the project is to develop and provide to the interested community a state-of-the-art statistical-analysis software framework that provides a robust methodology for data-to-theory comparisons, reliably accounting for statistical and systematic (both local and global) uncertainties, correlations between cross sections and polarizations, feed-down decay contributions from heavier quarkonia, kinematical domains where the theoretical models are valid, etc. Previous versions of this global-fit framework already lead to five papers (published in Phys. Lett. B and Eur. Phys. J. C), restricted to the analysis of mid-rapidity LHC data (published by ATLAS and CMS). The student will work on the extension of this analysis framework, so that it can easily incorporate experimental results covering a much broader rapidity range (including LHCb data) and also simultaneously process data sets collected at several collision energies (e.g., from 7 to 13 TeV).
Once the core of the project will be in place, further extensions will be followed, the exact details remaining to be decided as they will depend on the interests of the student. One option is to clone the framework so that it will also work for studies of quarkonium production at fixed-target energies (i.e., low transverse momentum); another option is to provide a user-friendly package that would be easy to use by any interested person, for more specific analyses, including the study of new theory models.
In any case, the student will acquire a deep hands-on knowledge of modern data analysis techniques, which certainly constitute a very useful tool-box, relevant for a broad range of scientific projects.
For more information, please contact Pietro.Faccioli@cern.ch or Carlos.Lourenco@cern.ch