George W. Housner Student Discovery Fund Proposal

George W. Housner Student Discovery Fund Proposal

1. Project Title:

2009 April APS Meeting

1. Contact Information:

Submitter: Andy Yen

Status: Undergraduate Student (Physics, Class of 2010)

Address: MSC 809

Email:

For simplicity, I will use my personal account to handle costs associated with attending this conference. Please make a check payable to Andy Yen and mail it to my campus address.

Project Advisors:Professor Harvey Newman ()

Dr. Marat Gataullin ()

1. Project Description:

For the past two years I have been working with the Caltech Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) group under Professor Harvey Newman. The Caltech CMS group is part of the CMS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. My research for the past two years has dealt with physics channels involving a photon final state. An abstract incorporating the results from this work was submitted to the American Physical Society April Meeting and is due to be accepted (It has already been approved by the CMS Collaboration). This request is for funding to attend that conference and present the results from my research. This will allow undergraduate research done at Caltech to be presented to the general scientific community while continuing to highlight the role of the Caltech CMS group at the forefront of photon studies at the CMS.

Below is the abstract for the talk:

Searches for New Physics in Photonic Final States

at the LHC with CMS

A brief summary of the CMS discovery potential for

New Phenomena in selected photonic final states is

presented. These include searches for diphoton

resonances from Higgs and Randall Sundrum graviton

decays, as well as a search for compositeness in

excited lepton decays. Since the CMS discovery in

these channels will rely heavily on performance of

the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter, the relevant

aspects of its design and operation in situ at the

LHC are also discussed.

The APS April meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious annual meetings held by the APS. This year, the conference runs from May 2nd to May 5th in Denver, Colorado. Attending the conference will give me an invaluable opportunity to interact with other physicists from many different fields and gain some insight into the inner workings of the scientific community.

More information about the conference can be found at the following website:

1. Organization information:

Caltech CMS Group

The funding requested here is for support of one undergraduate student. Non-undergraduates are involved only as mentors.

1. Projected Costs:

Flight: $250 (estimate)

Hotel: $162 per night (4 nights total, price is discounted APS group rate)

Ground transportation: $100 (estimate based on four trips to the airport at $25/trip)

Per diem: $50 (4 days total, estimate from gsa.gov)

Conference Registration: $0

Total Requested:$1200

1. Other Funding Sources:

The only other source of funding would be from the Caltech CMS Group budget. The budget of the Caltech CMS group is already strained from the US Department of Energy funding cutbacks introduced last year. Additionally, the group’s budget does not contain any specific funds for travel for an undergraduate student so money would have to be diverted from other areas. Thus, if at all possible, Professor Newman and I would like to avoid drawing from Caltech CMS group funds as the funding situation is already very critical.