Brian Moser

Biography

I am an experimental particle physicist collaborating on the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. My research focuses on studies of the Higgs boson and the characterization of silicon pixel detectors. Despite its central role in the currently accepted theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, the experimental picture of the Higgs boson is blurry at best. To understand the true nature of this new particle and answer the many questions surrounding it requires extensive studies of its properties. With my research I am providing the experimental input for this. I specialize in Higgs boson decays to heavy-flavor quarks, Higgs boson production at high transverse momentum and searches for Higgs boson pair production. All of these measurements require a functioning high precision silicon pixel detector at the centre of the detector. For this reason I collaborate in the construction of the ATLAS pixel detector upgrade that can withstand the increased intensity of the planned High-Luminosity LHC. This upgrade, if successful, will allow the collaboration to increase the collected data set 10-fold and will in turn allow me to increase the precision of my measurements by at least a factor three. I came to Oxford as a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow and will among other things work on the application of modern machine learning algorithms to measure the self-interaction of the Higgs boson through searches for Higgs boson pair production in the final state with two tau-leptons and two b-quarks.