Professor Hirosky’s research explores the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics at the world’s highest energy accelerator laboratories in the U.S. and Europe. Studies of the basic constituents of matter, searches for new states of matter, and precision tests of their fundamental interactions are performed by observing the collisions of ultra-relativistic particles at these unique facilities: the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago; and CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva Switzerland. Both the accelerator complexes and detector apparatus required for High Energy Physics studies are true engineering marvels, producing particles with energies thousands of times their rest mass, and then examining their collisions in sophisticated detectors capable of processing many Terabytes of information each second.
The goals of performing this research at the frontiers of available energies are many-fold. While the Standard Model has survived a wide variety of experimental tests numerous fundamental questions remain: Does Nature yet hold undiscovered symmetries and physical laws? Are there hidden dimensions of space-time? The universe appears to contain vast quantities of gravitational mass of unknown origin, what is the nature of this dark matter? What happened to the anti-matter as the universe evolved? What is the origin of mass? ...
Professor Hirosky is an active member of the D-Zero Experiment (http://www-d0.fnal.gov) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the Compact Muon Solenoid (http://cms.cern.ch) experiment at CERN. D-Zero has enjoyed very successful data runs. Earlier highlights of our results include the observation of the long sought after top quark, precision measurements in the Electroweak sector of the Standard Model, and the most stringent constraints on quark substructure and precise measurements of high energy jet production. D-Zero has recently completed a major upgrade and continues to expand its already vast data collection, offering a remarkable range of physics possibilities. These data are providing the first opportunity for precision studies of the top quark and greatly improving our sensitivity for observations of rare Electroweak and new physics processes. A search for the Higgs Boson, whose interactions are theorized to give rise to many observed particle masses, is a strong component of the Run II physics program. In 2008 the CMS Experiment will begin at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. With nearly an order of magnitude increase in energy, we will illuminate hitherto unexplored regions of the physical world and make great strides forward in understanding our most basic questions about the stuff of the Universe.
For more about HEP experimental research at UVa, see our website at: http://faculty.virginia.edu/hep/