Giovanni Bonvicini - US grants

This grant will support studies of the b (beauty) quark, one of the six types of quarks known to exist. This quark is one of the six types of quarks known to exist. Learning the properties of this quark will help us understand how the different types of quarks are related to each other and how they interact. The ultimate goal of this experiment is to understand why nature is not perfectly symmetric and why, for example, the Universe is comprised of matter and not anti-matter.

This grant will initiate a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site in the Physics Department of Wayne State University. Students will be recruited largely from colleges in the Greater Detroit area, and will spend part of the academic year at Wayne State in classes and lectures on experimental physics. They will then spend a summer at Cornell University participating in the REU Program there, as members of various research groups.

This proposal will result in a Large Angle Beamstrahlung Monitor at CESR, an electron positron collider. Colliders have become the tool of choice for frontier experiments in particle physics. The technique proposed here has the potential to provide a wealth of information about beam overlap at the collision point of colliders which can result in substantially higher luminosity, which means more data on the rare processes of interest. In addition to improving the performance of a collider, which is of direct interest to the particle physics experimenters, extracting the information from the beam overlap could lead to improvements in the understanding of the beam-beam interaction. This idea, if can be made viable, will have application in many colliding beam accelerators.

This proposal requests support for the research program of the Wayne State group which is involved in the CLEO experiment at the CESR facility at Cornell University and in the BTeV experiment currently planned for future running at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. This group participated actively in the physics analysis of CLEO II (the PI was co-spokesman for a term), made major contributions to the interaction region (IR) for the upgrade of CESR and CLEO, and helped with the new RICH particle identification detector. The group is currently working on interesting physics results with CLEO II data including D-mixing, the D-star width, rare semileptonic DS decays, the mass of the tau neutrino, B to tau nu, and accelerator physics.
For BTeV the group plans to bring its expertise in the construction of low mass and high precision machine-detector interfaces to this project. The physics interests include rare charm decays where no work beyond very promising early calculations have thus far been done. The proposed BTeV detector looks to be very sensitive to D-mixing. BTeV will become the group's main physics interest after the completion of CLEO.

Wayne State University has an REU program to bring disadvantaged students from the Detroit Metro Area to national laboratories over the summer. In this proposal we will bring six students to the LNS laboratory at Cornell University and four students to the BNL laboratory in Long Island, NY. WSU provides a uniquely diverse group of students, largely from underrepresented segments of society. The recruiting and preparation phase provides the students with intensive faculty interaction, encouragement, and an effort to make sure that the student needs are met. The program consists of a preparation phase involving a one-hour course given over the winter to students and prospective teacher participants (14 hours total). The course introduces the students and teachers to the physical and mathematical concepts relevant for the summer experience. The course also provides an introduction to the computing environment of a large experiment, and a computer homework, which requires the students to write and understand simple programs, produce some graphic output, and write their own web page within a Unix environment. Faculties travel with the students to Cornell and Brookhaven in early June to help them get settled and started. They merge with existing REU programs at Brookhaven and Cornell for social activities, and lectures on various scientific topics.

This proposal is from the Temple University, Wayne State University and Lincoln University groups and requests funding to investigate one of the most important questions of the 21st century: What is Dark Matter? A natural explanation is a population of relic Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) left over from the Big Bang. To directly detect WIMPs by their interaction inside a detector yielding a ~keV/amu recoil nucleus, the PIs have invented the Negative Ion Time Projection Chamber (NITPC) and have built a first generation device, the Directional Recoil Identification From Tracks detector (DRIFT-I) with an active volume of 1 m3 and an active mass of 167 g. DRIFT-I is currently taking data at the Boulby mine in Northeast England. The plan now is to build a scaled-up, much improved NITPC called DRIFT-II as a fully modular detector which could be scaled-up to ~100 kg active mass. The technique uses a low pressure, electronegative gas (CS2) target and is direction sensitive to neutron recoils.

In the education/outreach area, the DRIFT detector technology has promising applications to Homeland Security and for tracking at the Next Linear Collider. The project has already brought people from underrepresented groups into cutting edge research. The tradition is enhanced by collaboration with Lincoln University, an HBC.

This proposal is for continued operation of an active CLEO/BTeV group at Wayne State University. The group consists of two faculty, Professors Bonvicini and Cinabro, one postdoc, two graduate students, and a few undergraduates. With our past NSF support the group participated in the construction and operation of CLEO and worked on CLEO-II physics analysis. The Wayne State group leads the analysis efforts in charm decays and maintains the background monitoring hardware. The analysis efforts have helped discover the DsJ(2460), have observed the neutral D to kaon decay for the first time and analyzed its substructure using the Dalitz technique. The group has demonstrated a novel method of measuring the tracking efficiency with the data to very high precision. Physics with the CLEO-c experiment is now starting. The group is working to maintain and support physics analysis with the detector. Physics interests include three-body hadronic charm decays and searches for charm mixing and other rare charm decays.

On BTeV, the group has participated in detector R&D where they have focused on the cooling of the pixel detector. The plan is to move into construction with work on the hardware of the pixel cooling system and testing of pixel electronic components. BTeV's ability to search for rare charm decays has been studied. The group continues to work on an innovative beamstrahlung monitor, which can optimize the delivered luminosity at electron-positron colliders. A prototype has been built at CESR-c. The group plans to demonstrate the detector, complete its construction, and work on the design for a high-energy linear collider.

The Wayne State group runs a very successful outreach effort in their REU/RET program. This program achieves its intrinsic goals of promoting undergraduate and younger student interest in careers in science, technology, and engineering, especially among the underrepresented, and makes connections with K/12 teachers. The students and teachers also have made a significant contribution to the research effort.

Note: Since this proposal was submitted, the BTeV research program to be conducted at Fermilab was terminated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Wayne State University offers an REU program to bring disadvantaged students from the Detroit Metro Area to national laboratories over the summer. Opportunities for students are offered at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, and at Cornell University's Laboratory for Elementary and Particle Physics. Similar opportunities also exist for in-service teachers through an RET component of the program. WSU recruits a uniquely diverse group of students, largely from underrepresented segments of society. The program consists of a preparation phase involving a one-hour course given over the winter to students and prospective teacher participants (14 hours total). The course introduces the students and teachers to the physical and mathematical concepts relevant for the summer experience. The course also provides an introduction to the computing environment of a large experiment, and a computer homework, which requires the students to write and understand simple programs, produce some graphic output, and write their own web page within a Unix environment. This preparation phase provides the students with intensive faculty interaction, encouragement, and an effort to make sure that student needs are met. Wayne State faculty then travel with the students and teachers to Brookhaven, Fermilab, and Cornell in early June to help them get settled and started. The participants merge with other existing REU programs at each site for social activities, and lectures on various scientific topics.

Wayne State University continues to focus its research effort on charm physics at the Cornell CESR storage ring. The group has participated in all recent CLEO experimental versions and continues to work extensively on CLEO physics analysis. The group has led the analysis of the rare Do decay D -> Ks , demonstrated a novel method of measuring the tracking efficiency of CLEO to very high precision with the data, and developed a novel method for observing beam-beam interactions and measuring beam parameters at e+e- colliders using beamstrahlung radiation. The group is currently focusing on the operation, maintenance and physics of CLEO-c. Work on the innovative beamstrahlung monitor continues, with an eye toward optimization of delivered luminosity at e+e- colliders. Wayne State runs a very successful outreach REU/RET program which promotes undergraduate and younger student interest in careers in science, technology, and engineering, especially among the underrepresented, and makes connections with K/12 teachers. Students and teachers make a significant contribution to the research effort, and the WSU group counts as current members two students who are alumni of the program.

This award will fund the on going research program of the Wayne State University Elementary Particle Physics group on analyses of the CLEO-c data. The group consists of two faculty, Professors Bonvicini and Cinabro, and three graduate students working towards their PhD degrees. The NSF supported the group participation in the construction and operation of the CLEO detector as well as data taking. This research grant will enable the continuation the group analysis effort and allow them to complete the physics analysis of the CLEO-c data. The Analysis effort concentrate on the studies of three body charm decays using the Dalitz technique, measurements of D D-bar mixing parameters taking advantage of the quantum correlations of the D mesons produced at CLEO, and in rare charm decays. The three graduate students will concentrate on searches for higher order Fock states in rare semi-leptonic D decays and correlated Dalitz plot studies.

This grant will also support the extensive involvement of the group in undergraduate student's research via an REU/RET program. This program achieves its intrinsic goals of promoting undergraduate and younger student interest in careers in science, technology, and engineering, especially among the under-represented, and making connections with K/12 teachers. The group found that in addition the students and teachers in the program have been able to make a significant contribution to their research effort.

This award provides partial support for a student to participate in the International Linear Collider Summer School, Ambleside, United Kingdom, Aug. 17-23,2009.

Charm physics is an important component of the field of flavor physics. This field is currently in a renaissance with significant results coming from measurements at a number of experimental facilities worldwide, including B-factories, Hadron Colliders, and Charm factories. An important objective in flavor physics is the determination of all of the elements of the Cabibbo Kobayashi Maskawa (CKM) mixing matrix, which is a matrix of complex numbers that relates the electroweak interactions of the six known flavors (or types) of quarks. The Wayne State University group has made significant contributions to the study of the mixing of neutral charm D mesons at CLEO-c. Notable among their measurements is the extraction of an important parameter known as the strong phase in decays of neutral D mesons into final states containing charged Kaons and Pions. This measurement has impact on the determination of one of the CKM mixing angles called gamma. The group plans to continue the study of D decays with BELLE-II at KEK in Japan and is exploring a new test of CP violation in D decays. Additionally at BELLE-II, the group intends to study rare decays of D mesons, looking for 4 quark content, and building upon earlier expertise gained at CLEO-c. The broader impacts efforts of the group are considerable through REU/RET programs, reaching students from underrepresented groups who participate directly in the research program.