Congratulations to the CMS member Valentina Mariani, one of the six winners of the Italian 18th edition of the L’ORÉAL - UNESCO “For women in science” programme.
Each year, L’ORÉAL Italia in collaboration with the Italian National Commission for UNESCO, announces scholarships to be assigned to young and promising researchers to promote the improvement of their professional training in the fields of Life Sciences of the Matter, including Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.
Valentina’s project, selected from among more than 300 proposals for its excellence in the STEM field, focuses on development of new data analysis for the CMS silicon tracker for the future HL-LHC era.
Meet Valentina and learn more about the project.
Valentina Mariani - University of Perugia and INFN
I am Valentina Mariani, a 29 year old physicist and I have been a CMS member since 2015. I graduated in particle physics at the University of Perugia, Italy. In 2015, I started my PhD studying charm physics in proton-proton collision at the LHC. In 2017, I won a fellow position at CERN that gave me the chance to develop my research in the best environment, by getting fully involved in the experiment with important responsibility roles.
Project title: Possibilities of new physics in the HL-LHC era.
The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider(HL-LHC) project at CERN will increase luminosity (number of particle collisions) by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value.
The HL-LHC era will start in 2027 and at CMS we are currently preparing both detector and data analysis in order to be ready for this new and exciting scenario.
A new silicon tracker detector will be installed in CMS, with higher acceptance and with a greater resistance to radiation, in order to survive future conditions and to continue to extract the best data.
A key aim of this upgrade is to improve the radiation hardness of the silicon sensors. To implement this, predictive models and tools will be developed to optimise the design and operations of the new generation silicon detectors.
Extending both the silicon tracker detector acceptance and the data taken means increasing the sensitivity for rare or unaccessible processes and looking for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
One of the most promising interactions we aim to have better data to work with in the future is represented by the Vector Boson Scattering (VBS).
The VBS signature is the emission of two electroweak bosons together with two high-energetic jets in the forward regions of the detector.
This process is foreseen by the Standard Model but it is expected to be particularly sensitive to new physics signals that may indirectly reveal an increase of the VBS cross section at high invariant masses.
The views expressed in CMS blogs are personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent official views of the CMS collaboration.