Research Abstract
The forefront research facilities of high energy physics are colliding beam accelerators. These machines provide the highest achievable interaction energies. Professor Lankford's prior research has exploited colliders at CERN, SLAC, Fermilab, and in Beijing. His UCI collider physics group presently has an experiment at SLAC and is actively involved in developing a new experiment at CERN. An exciting aspect of participation in these large experiments is their international character.
At SLAC, Prof. Lankford's group is part of the BaBar Collaboration, which studies the origins of the non-conservation of charge-parity quantum numbers. This investigation is based upon high-statistics studies of the properties of bottom quarks in electron-positron collisions at the B-factory PEP-II.
At CERN, Prof. Lankford's group is part of the large international ATLAS Collaboration, which is developing an apparatus to study proton-proton collisions using a new facility, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will provide energies higher than those yet achieved, 14TeV. Starting in 2007, experimentation at the LHC will afford the opportunity to explore physics at mass scales more than an order of magnitude higher than are currently accessible, with the promise to bring exciting new discoveries, even if the precise nature of the discoveries cannot be foreseen.
Professor Lankford's research at colliders has largely focused on studies of the properties of heavy quarks and leptons and on electroweak physics. His studies utilize the detection of leptons as harbingers of rare and interesting physics processes. In addition, he develops new particle detection techniques and electronics systems for his experiments.