Undergraduates
I am a sceptic of relativity theory and am trying to become a believer. As far as I know (about this theory), time slows down when some one travels at the speed of light. What about blind people ? Will this effect happen for them as well ?.. I am curious because blind people have nothing to do with light.
Professor Neubauer received his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania (2001) after obtaining a bachelor's degree in physics from Kutztown University (1994). 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 all solar ne's change flavor (ne®nm,t) 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 that became the most cited paper in physics in the two years following its publication.
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 and the most stringent limits on Higgs boson production to date (in decay to W boson pairs).
The CDF II Experiment
Run II at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider began in March of 2001 and will continue to probe the high energy frontier in particle physics until the start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. My current research at CDF is primarily focused on searches for the Higgs boson and new physics. In the standard model, the Higgs plays a central role in electroweak symmetry breaking and the generation of particle masses. It has not yet been observed, and there are many reasons to believe that the story may be more complicated than a single scalar Higgs boson realized in Nature. I am searching for Higgs boson production and decay to diboson final states, such as pairs of W bosons decaying leptonically. My research also involves more general study of heavy diboson final states such as WZ and ZZ and searches for anomalies that may signal the existence of new physics.
The ATLAS Experiment
Particle physics is about to embark on a unique, and possibly defining, period in its distinguished history with the turn-on of the LHC at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. At the LHC, protons are collided together with seven times the center of mass energy of p-pbar collisions at the Tevatron. At last, we will be able to directly probe the TeV energy scale, where it is believed that some new physics should be lurking, although we can only speculate about what form this will take. My research is focused on early searches for the Higgs boson and searches for new physics in final states involving lepton, jets, and missing energy. In addition, our group is involved in detector commissioning and development of a fast hardware tracker (FTK) for ATLAS to provide high-quality tracks from the silicon hit information for use in trigger decision and downstream processing.