ATLAS - AG Lacker
ATLAS is a multipurpose detector for elementary particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Using highest-energy proton beams searches for New Physics beyond the standard model of elementary particle physics are performed. The ATLAS-collaboration consists of more than 3000 physicists from more than 35 different countries all over the world. The ATLAS-group of Professor Lacker at Humboldt-University is especially involved in the SCT detector, the upgtade of the Inner Tracker for the LHC high-luminosity phase (HL-LHC) and
in searches for heavy neutral leptons, like right-handed Majorana neutrinos.
Research Topics
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Heavy Neutral Leptons
The existence and the smallness of neutrino masses compared to the other fundamental neutrino masses points to physics beyond the standard model. A viable extension of the standard model are right-handed neutrinos, which would not only gove a natural explanation of the tiny neutrino masses but also possible explanation for the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and even possible particle candidate for dark matter in the keV mass range. We are using the ATLAS inner detector to search for long-lived heavy neutral leptons in the mass range of a fwe GeV to a few 10 GeV, which includes possible right-handed neutrinos.
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Strip Tracker Upgrade
To increase the potential of the discovery of new physics and to allow for taking precision measurements of the “known” physics, it is planned to upgrade the LHC (which will be called HL-LHC – high luminosity LHC) by increasing its maximum luminosity up to 10^35 cm^-2s-^1 and the beam energy up to 7 TeV aiming ultimately to collect data of ~3000 fb^-1. After such a powerful upgrade of the LHC, detectors to register products of proton-proton collisions in HL-LHC have necessarily to be upgraded as well. One of the areas of ATLAS considerable upgrade is a replacement of the SCT and TRT detectors by a new silicon vertex detector (Inner Tracker or ITk), which will be suited to the harsh HL-LHC condition in terms of particle rates and radiation doses as well as to cope with the substantial increase in pile-up events as the higher luminosity.
Group members
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Postdoctoral research fellows
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Dr. Christian Scharf
PhD students
Christian Appelt
Yan Wing Ng
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Master students
Julius Ehrsam
Theses
List of theses written within the ATLAS group
Publications
List of publications of the ATLAS group
Links