AARON WHITE

Contact

450 Church St.
Randall Laboratory
Ann Arbor, MI, 48109
United States of America

Education

Research interests

Research experience

Current analysis projects (Advisor Prof. Bing Zhou)

  1. Search for the decay of the Higgs boson to dimuons.This work started in May 2016 with Run 2 data. The dimuon invariant mass spectrum is used to look for the Higgs boson signature in the dimuon decay channel. This research is exciting as it has the potential to first observe the Yukawa coupling of the Higgs boson to the 2nd generation fermions, and will confirm the origin of the muon’s mass through its interaction with the Higgs field. While I have participated in the full H–>mm analysis, I am the leading responsible person for adding the event categories from the WH and ZH production mechanisms. I use the leptonic decays of the associated vector bosons (W, Z) as a handle to separate signal from background events using machine learning. I explore many ML approaches to improve the detection sensitivity. I also work on signal systematics, including for the ggH and VBF production mechanisms. For WH and ZH I am responsible for selection criteria, categorization, spurious signal measurement, and background modeling. I was selected to present the result on H–>mm search in different international conferences. A final publication with full dataset of Run 2 is expected in early 2020.

  2. Search for new physics with non-resonant features in the dilepton spectra. This work started in 2018. The search examines the $ee$ and $\mu\mu$ invariant mass spectra for signs of contact interactions, which would modify the di-lepton inv. mass spectra predicted by the SM. Additional events (non-resonant) would be produced in the TeV mass scale of the dilepton mass. I use a novel background modeling method based on a fit to the data in a low mass control region, which avoids losing sensitivity to non-resonant enhancements in the high-mass region. The analysis provides results in a model independent context, and then interprets these in the case of $q\bar{q}\ell\ell$ contact interactions. This is physically important as it provides a way to search for lepton sub-structure, a critical question of the nature of presumably fundamental particles. I coordinate this analysis project in the role of the analysis contact. I also wrote and maintain a general purpose resonant search tool for using in the analysis called Pystrapolate. My additional contributions are to background modeling, systematics, and the statistical framework for limit setting. A publication based on full dataset from Run 2 is expected in early 2020.

Other research projects

Publications [P]

I am an author on 937 papers (912 from the ATLAS Collaboration, 23 from the PHENIX Collaboration). I have made particular contributions to:

Talks [T], Posters [P], and Conference Notes [C]

Teaching experience

Classes taught at the University of Michigan (as a Graduate Student Teaching Assistant):

Awards and grants

Service

Technical skills