Mark Neubauer

Mark Neubauer
Mark Neubauer

Primary Research Area

  • High Energy Physics
Professor
(217) 244-3913
411 Loomis Laboratory

For More Information

Education

  • Ph.D - University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (June 2001)

Biography

Professor Neubauer received his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania (2001). After receiving his Ph.D, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2004) and the University of California, San Diego (2004-2007). Professor Neubauer joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in Fall 2007.

Professor Neubauer is an experimental physicist whose research has spanned a diverse set of topics in the study of elementary particles and their interactions. The ultimate goal of this pursuit is to gain a deeper understanding of Nature at its most fundamental level and to elucidate the physics that lies beyond the standard model.

His research began as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania working on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment, which was designed to resolve the long-standing deficit of solar ne observed in previous experiments. His Ph.D. thesis, Evidence for neFlavor Change Through Measurement of the 8B Solar n Flux at SNO demonstrated in 2001 that ~2/3 of solar neutrinos change flavor before detection on Earth, which can occur if neutrinos have non-zero mass and mixing. This result was published soon thereafter in a Phys. Rev. Lett. article

As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and then UCSD, he conducted research at the current energy frontier provided by proton-antiproton collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron. As member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment, he made important contributions to heavy flavor and high-pt physics, including searches for the Higgs boson and new physics. In 2002, he and colleagues at MIT undertook a complete re-design of the CDF analysis computing model, out of which emerged the CDF Analysis Facility (CAF), for which he served as project leader from 2002 to 2004. He played a leading role in the study of electroweak dibosons at CDF as convener of the Diboson Physics Group (2006-2007). In 2006, he led the first-ever observation of WZ diboson production. In 2007, he and colleagues provided the first evidence for ZZ production at a hadron collider.

As a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, Professor Neubauer contributed to discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Research Statement

Particle physics is embarking on a journey of exploration of the energy frontier with the turn-on of Run II at the LHC at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. At the LHC, protons are collided together with 13 TeV of center of mass energy. My research is broadly focused on searches for new phenomena at the LHC. Professor Neubauer's Group is developing electronics for the ATLAS Fast Hardware Tracker (FTK) system which will provide high-quality tracks from the silicon hit information for use in trigger decision and downstream processing. I am also involved in a number of computing projects for scientific research, including principle investigator for the ATLAS Tier-2 cluster at Illinois -- one of three clusters in the Midwest Tier-2 which is the largest LHC Tier-2 in the world, a member of the Open Science Grid Executive Team, and co-PI for the conceptualization of a Scientific Software Innovation Institute for high-energy physics.

Selected Articles in Journals

Research Honors

  • Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, 2016 (2016)
  • Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, 2013 (2013)
  • Fellow, Center for Advanced Study (University of Illinois), 2012-2013 (2012-2013)
  • National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2011 (2011)
  • Faculty Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 2008-2009 (2008)
  • Arnold O. Beckman Research Award, 2007 (2007)

Recent Courses Taught

  • PHYS 213 - Univ Physics: Thermal Physics
  • PHYS 214 - Univ Physics: Quantum Physics
  • PHYS 246 - Intro to Computational Physics
  • PHYS 398 DAP (PHYS 398 MLA) - Soph/Junr Special Topics Phys
  • PHYS 470 - Subatomic Physics
  • PHYS 498 MLP - Special Topics in Physics
  • PHYS 503 - Instr Phys Appl Machine Learn

Semesters Ranked Excellent Teacher by Students

SemesterCourseOutstanding
Fall 2014PHYS 487