| Spandex is a fully equipped ATLAS "tour guide" - here he is (in the white coat, bottom left) showing some members of the public around before the detector was installed |
The Atlas High Level Trigger
With 40 million collisions every second at the LHC there are too many collisions to save them all, so the ATLAS Detector uses a multi level Trigger system to reconstruct the events at different stages, each stage performing increasingly complex reconstrudtion and successively discarding those events that are less interesting. This ensures that we can correctly identify and save the few tens of "golden" events, such as those containing a Higgs boson, that arrive each second, and still safely throw away the millions of other, less interesting events.
Fits to the parton distribution functions in the proton
I work on the APPLgrid project to stores the weights from NLO calculations so that the calculations need be executed only once, and can be reproduced with different parton distributions later in only a few milliseconds rather than the weeks that some calculations may take. This enables full NLO calculations which would otherwise be too slow, to be used in PDF fitting code.
Publications
A list of my publications from the SLAC spires preprint server.