High Energy Physics

I have spent five years (including my PhD) working in the CMS Collaboration at CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Most of my research was dedicated to Higgs boson physics.

My work was on statistical and physics analysis which means making sense of terabytes of data collected by the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Doing physics analysis also means to make the unvisible visible. For example, neither the Higgs boson itself nor the many ‘‘background’’ processes can be measured directly. Worse, even most of the decay products cannot be measured directly. Consequently, everything needs to be reconstructed from terabytes of detector data by using sophisticated software tools and physical simulations.

One of my biggest contributions was to develope the so-called Fake Factor Method. The fake factor method is a fully data-driven background estimation method for the most important background processes of the standard model Higgs boson and potential supersymmetric twins. Fully data-driven means that only directly recorded collision data is needed in contrast to standard background estimation methods which require tons of simulation data. This makes the fake factor method more robust and scalable. The fake factor method is still used as go-to tool in modern Higgs boson analyses.