root@delano:/home/Research/Physics/$ ls

Physics

We are analyzing the datasets that our group at UCLA helps collect through custom electronics and custom algorithms hosted on the electronics. We are currently searching for Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) that couple to the Higgs boson and photons and are proposed in a variety of extensions to the Standard Model, potentially allowing us to discover new physics. The ALPs exist in a parameter space that allows them to be potentially long-lived particles (LLPs), which poses an immediate detection challenge at CMS since the detector was not designed to search for LLPs. A novel approach to estimating the distance from the beamline in the transverse direction (Lxy) was developed by my advisor, Michalis Bachtis, and then-graduate student Tyler Lam to reconstruct the vertex of the potentially long-lived particle. This vertex-reconstruction technique uses the kinematics of the diphoton pair to build a high-resolution estimate of the vertex distance. As a result, my analysis uses the gluon-fusion production mode of the Higgs boson to search for a clean final state in which the Higgs boson decays to ALPs, which then decay to pairs of photons. The analysis searches for displaced diphotons using the full Run 2 and Run 3 datasets collected by CMS at the LHC. Detection and discovery of this ALP could help explain dark matter.