Oklahoma State High Energy Physics

Dr. Wasikul Islam - My Research

 My Research :

As an experimental particle Physicist, I do my research to understand the world of Physics at the most fundamental level in terms of the particles, which are the building blocks of our universe. I conduct various searches for New Physics using the data collected by the ATLAS detector at CERN and I also do measurements of Physics processes, hardware studies, and algorithm developments for our ATLAS experiment. I do some phenomenological studies as well on my personal interests.

Searches/Physics Analysis at ATLAS detector of LHC :

1. I performed searches for Singly Charged Higgs Boson through ‘dijet + lepton’ channel at the Large hadron Collider with the ATLAS detector. In that dijet + lepton analysis, apart from Charged Higgs, we looked for Z prime, Dark matter etc. & we explored many different beyond the standard models (BSMs).

2. I searched for a new exotic particle W′ (W prime boson) which is proposed by many of the extended gauge models. I searched for this particle in the decay mode of  W′ → tb in all hadronic channel with the full run 2 data of ATLAS detector.

3. We did searches for new physics in multi-body invariant masses in events with an isolated lepton using √s = 13 TeV proton–proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector.

4. Currently I am searching for the Higgs boson decaying to a pair of muons in pp collisions with the ATLAS detector: Working on the implementation of machine learning techniques and background modeling studies for the analysis.

5. We are searching for new physics in the form of anomalous events through Anomaly detection studies using novel machine learning techniques using data from the ATLAS detector at LHC.

6. I am also working on some applications of Quantum Machine Learning to High Energy Physics Analysis at LHC: Using the qubit platform to solve computational challenges of LHC in deploying quantum machine learning for High Energy Physics.

Combined performance studies at LHC :

•  The efficient identification of jets from bottom quarks (b-jets) is one of the~most important techniques for many physics analyses at the Large Hadron Collider, including studies of the Higgs boson, the top quark, and searches beyond the Standard Model. The performance is characterized by b-tagging efficiency (probability to identify a b-jet as such) and the mistag rate (probability to mistakenly accept a non-b-jet). So, mistag rate calibration has been a very important task for LHC as well. I contributed to the development of a completely “new method” for light jet calibrations with the ATLAS detector of LHC. 

High-Performance Computation/Machine Learning studies for LHC Physics :

• Working on Application of Quantum Machine Learning to High Energy Physics Analysis at LHC.
• As a Research Aide at  the ‘High Energy Physics Center for Computational Excellence’ (HEP-CCE) of Argonne National Laboratory and I am worked on the feasibility of using Deep Neural Network(DNN) in HEP problems, specifically for ‘object classification’, ‘event recognition’ with the ATLAS detector data. I have completed the project of Object recognition at Argonne National lab in Summer 2017 and currently working on more complicated problems. I performed these studies with the help of Super Computer Cori of NERSC facility of LBNL, Supercomputers Mira, Theta, Coolie, Jupyter of Argonne National lab.  More details of the study can be found here.                                                                                                                                       

 Detector upgrade studies for High Luminosity(HL)- LHC :

• As ‘ANL-ATLAS Graduate Fellow 2017’  and Resident Associate of Argonne National Laboratory for one year, I worked for a “High Luminocity-LHC” upgrade project on ‘ITK Pixel R&D’ using the testbeam facility at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory .  A report on these studies can be available here.                                                          

Others ( ALICE detector & Masters project) :

• And as an Intern at CERN in the ALICE experiment, I worked in Accelerator Physics in 2015. Apart from studying on accelerator physics and I also developed some tools for outreach activities of ‘Accelerator Physics’ to people of different age groups. I also created a CERN twiki page regarding that.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
•  As a Masters student in India, I worked  on : ‘Future Neutrino Oscillation Experiments’ for my master’s thesis. Where we did some calculations of 3 flavor neutrino oscillation in matter and in free space and we studied the future prospects of 23 Neutrino oscillation experiments which were about to start or just started at that time. 

 My some of Ph.D. Research at Oklahoma State University with the ATLAS collaboration was explained in the following short video made in 2016 for university’s official video channel Ostate.Tv.