Contact Information

German Colón
1036 Lederle Graduate Research Tower
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Email: gcolon@physics.umass.edu
Phone: (413) 545-1439

Research

Elementary Particle Physics

Our group is involved in the ATLAS experiment located at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. At 46m long, 25m wide and 25m high, ATLAS is the largest volume detector ever constructed for particle physics. Among the questions ATLAS will focus on are why particles have mass, what the unknown 96% of the Universe is made of, and why Nature prefers matter to antimatter; i.e. it will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe.

Diagram of ATLAS Detector


For more pictures of the ATLAS detector and the experiment site click here

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -Albert Einstein


Current Research

I am studying the correlation between the Missing (Transversal) Energy and the geometry of the Muon Spectrometer. The goal is to determine whether the missing ET in the event is due to:

  • low pT muons that were not reconstructed
  • high energy jets capable of reaching the muon spectrometer
  • high pT muons that escaped through gaps in the muon spectrometer , or
  • Events Beyond the Standard Model!

Among the physics beyond the Standard Model, I am studying SUSY events where χ2 decays to the LSP (lightest supersymmetric particle) and two leptons, specially two muons (i.e. χ2 → χ1l±l∓ or χ2 → χ1μ±μ∓); and black holes production.