Mehrunnisa Mirza

Profile

Project Title: The Electroweak Phase Transition and High-Density Tracking at Future Colliders

Supervisor: Dr. Graham White (University of Southampton) and Dr. Seth Zenz (Queen Mary University of London)

Content: This project involves working toward the understanding of the Electroweak Phase Transition at future colliders, including improvements both to theoretical modelling and to detector algorithms. It will seek to build our understanding of future colliders' potential by combining both the theoretical perspective and the experimental perspective. Although the benefits of a 100 TeV collider are understood in principle, the detailed requirements for detectors at such a collider need to be understood in light of this theoretical potential. One extraordinary experimental challenge for identifying and measuring charged leptons is tracking algorithms: 100 TeV collisions with rates an order of magnitude higher than the current Large Hadron Collider will mean a density of data points in every collision that far exceed what is handled by current algorithms. New approaches to tracking will need to be explored, with the potential to inform detector layouts or to develop new techniques for pattern-finding.

This project will include the following activities:

Year 1 - Southampton based - focus strongly on coursework and background reading. Begin working with relevant MC event generator samples to Electroweak Phase Transition (EWPT), learn how to do generator-level studies for future colliders (along the lines of Dr. Graham White's existing work on EWPT)

Year 2 - QMUL based - focus on FCC detector modelling with Dr. Seth Zenz and apply these developments to see how they change the results of studies from Year 1

Year 3 - Southampton based - Focus on novel theoretical work on EWPT

Year 4 - QMUL based - tying everything together and finish writing up.

Funding: STFC Studentship (QMUL) + FPSE/P&A (SOTON)

Research

Publications