On August 21, 2013, Dr. Kevin Finelli successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, Duke's first Ph.D. thesis analyzing the data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Dr. Finelli’s thesis developed and employed a novel technique, originally developed for CDF by Prof. Mark Kruse, his former grad student Dr. Sebastian Carron, postdoc Dr. Mircea Coca, and senior scientist Doug Benjamin to simultaneously extract the production cross-sections of various rare processes produced by proton-proton collisions at the LHC, which subsequently decay into high-energy electrons and muons. By doing so, the analysis lays the foundations for more model-independent searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Dr. Finelli will soon embark on the next stage of his career in particle physics. On October 1 he begins a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney, Australia, funded through the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Particle Physics (CoEPP), a conglomeration of Australian Universities that has a very strong presence on ATLAS. Congratulations to Dr. Finelli for his successes.
Department of Physics
