Ritchie Patterson

Helen T. Edwards Professor of Physics

Overview

Experimental particle physics; physics beyond the standard model; weak interactions.

Research Focus

Our model of elementary particles describes an enormous number of experimental results, but it falls short of explaining phenomena such as dark matter, the disappearance of anti-matter from the universe, and the small size of the radiative corrections to the Higgs mass. My research uses data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to seek the new phenomena and particles that may explain these mysteries.  Specifically, I look for particles with distinctly long lifetimes, since these would be unequivocal evidence for new phenomena and are predicted in numerous models.

In addition to my LHC research, I direct the Center for Bright Beams (CBB), which is an NSF Science and Technology Center that works to increase the brightness of electron beams in order to provide new capabilities for scientific research, industry and medicine.  CBB research, which currently involves ten colleges and universities and three national labs, is exceptionally collaborative and highly interdisciplinary.

Graduate Students
Shaun Hogan
Peace Kotamnives

Publications

CMS Collaboration, Search for long-lived particles with displaced vertices in multijet events in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=13 TeV, Phys. Rev. D 98, 092011 (2018).

Search for R-parity violating supersymmetry with displaced vertices in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(S)=8 TeV, Phys. Rev. D. 95 012009 (2017)