Thomas A. Ferguson Professor Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles Email: ferguson@cmphys.phys.cmu.edu Phone: (412) 268-2744 FAX: (412) 681-0648

Research interests are in experimental high-energy particle physics and, in particular, the use of electron-positron colliding beams. Our group is a member of the L3 experiment, which is taking data using the Large Electron Positron (LEP) colliding beam accelerator at the European high energy physics center (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. With a center- of-mass energy of around 160 GeV, LEP is the highest energy electron-positron accelerator in the world. This high energy allows us to study the decays of the neutral Intermediate Vector Boson, Z, one of the carriers of the weak interaction force. Through such decays we can learn more about the properties of the weak interaction, put limits on important parameters of the electro-weak model, such as the number of neutrino species, and search for as yet undiscovered particles such as the Higgs boson. Our group constructed two arrays of over 600 bismuth-germanate crystals and 8000 channels of silicon strip detectors, which are used in the L3 experiment to measure very low-angle electron-positron elastic scattering events. The number of such events determines the integrated luminosity for the experiment. In the next few years, the LEP center-of-mass energy will be raised to 190 GeV, allowing the pair-production of W bosons, the other carrier of the weak force. This will allow a very accurate determination of the W mass and the study of its decay properties. Our group is also a member of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Collaboration, which is building an experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 14 TeV proton-proton colliding beam accelerator to be built at CERN. We are members of the forward muon system and are designing and building the front-end electronics for the anode wires of the forward muon cathode-strip chambers.

Selected Publications

D. M. Asner et al., “Study of Exclusive Charmless Semileptonic  Decays and Extraction of  at CLEO”,  Physical Review D 76, 012007 (2007), hep-ex/0703042

D. Cronin-Hennessy et al., “Study of Dipion Transitions Among Upsilon(3S), Upsilon(2S) and Upsilon(1S) States”, Physical Review D 76, 072001 (2007), arXiv:0706.2317

T. K. Pedlar et al., “Measurement of and the Decay Constant ”,  Physical Review D 76, 072002 (2007), arXiv:0704.0437

S. B. Athar et al., “Search for Radiative Decays of  ”,  Physical Review D 76, 072003 (2007), arXiv:0704.3063

D. Besson et al., “Measurement of the Total Hadronic Cross Section in  Annihilations Below 10.56 GeV”, Physical Review D 76, 072008 (2007), arXiv:0706.2813