ANDREW BRANDT's Home Page

Contact Information

Work Address and Phone Number

    Andrew Brandt
    University of Texas, Arlington 
    Physics Department
    BOX 19059
    Arlington, TX 76019-0059

Office: 344 Physics and Chemistry Building (CPB)
Phone: (817) 272-2706
FAX:   (817) 272-2824

E-mail: brandta@uta.edu

I am a physics undergraduate advisor for students whose last names begin with A-M. Please e-mail me to setup an appointment.
Resume

Teaching

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Arlington . I teach undergraduate and graduate physics classes at UTA. This semester, Fall 2008 I am teaching Physics 3446, Nuclear and Particle Physics . I am currently supervising graduate students Arnab Pal. My last student Dr. Michael Strang graduated in August 2005, and is a post-doc on CMS.

Research

My field of research is High Energy Physics. I have been a member of the D0 Experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, IL since 1992. My primary research focus is now the ATLAS Collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and I just completed a Faculty Development Leave there (Jan.-Aug. 2008).

ATLAS

I have several responsibilities in ATLAS:
1) Trigger. During my sabbatical I became involved in the trigger effort, which seeks to choose the most interesting 200 events out of the 10-40 million collisions each second. I am leading the trigger rates group, charged with measuring and evaluating the trigger menus.
2) Gap Physics. I have been working with Andrew Pilkington (Manchester) and Mario Campanelli (UC-London) to establish a new physics group in ATLAS to perform diffractive measurements (discussed further below) in early running, before the luminosity is high enough for discovery physics.
3) FP420. Since mid-2005, a significant fraction of my research has been on the FP420 R&D project, which is studying the feasibility of adding far forward Roman pots to ATLAS and CMS, to aid in discovery physics, such as the Higgs boson. Recently we proposed this upgrade to ATLAS management, and our proposal will be reviewed in the coming months. I am on the executive board of FP420, and leading the effort on time-of-flight counter development. We are attempting to build a small timing counter with 10 picosecond resolution! Light travels only 3 mm in 10 psec. I was Spokesman of a Fermilab test-beam experiment (T958) to develop and test this detector. I received a Texas ARP grant and a DOE Advanced Detector Research Grant (press release) to support this research. Here is a picture from our September 2006 test beam run:

I hosted a workshop on fast timing in April 2006: (see web page). I also hosted an FP420 collaboration meeting in March 2007

I also recently received an NSF/Homeland Security Grant (press release) with UTA Assistant Professor Wei Chen to develop a nanoparticle based WMD detector.

DZero

One of my physics interests is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), especially hard diffraction and rapidity gaps, and I have had several responsibilities in D0 related to these topics:

Co-Leader Forward Proton Detector

I initiated the proposal to add a Forward Proton Detector to D0 for Run II of the Tevatron starting in March 20001 and am currently the Level 3 Manager of the Forward Proton Detector and co-leader of the FPD project along with Alberto Santoro of LAFEX (Brazil). The FPD page has all the details. If you are unable to access our web page, you can get some of the information here. The final Roman pot castle design is shown here, along with a picture of Alberto and me (right) looking proudly at the first Roman pot castle at Fermilab.

The FPD is integrated into the D0 readout, with the aid of an NSF MRI grant and a Texas ARP grant. For an overview talk on FPD and diffractive physics, see my Nov. 5, 2003 UTA Colloquium Part I and Part II. Please contact me for further details.

Run I Rapidity Gap Convener

I founded the rapidity gap group Run I at DZero, and we published three papers based on the thesis work of (Brent May, Tracy Taylor Thomas, and Jill Perkins) on rapidity gaps between jets:

Rapidity Gaps between Jets in pbarp Collisions at sqrt s = 1.8 TeV
Phys. Rev. Letters {72} 2332 (1994) PDF (Copyright by the APS)
FERMILAB PUB-94/005-E PS
Jet Production via Strongly-Interacting Color-Singlet Exchange in pbarp Collisions
Phys. Rev. Lett. {76} 734 (1996) PDF (Copyright by the APS)
FERMILAB PUB-95/302-E PS
Probing Hard Color-Singlet Exchange in pbarp Collisions at sqrt(s)=630 Gev and 1800 GeV
Phys. Lett. B {440} 189 (1998)
FERMILAB PUB-98/285-E, hep-ex/9809016. PS

I also wrote papers on Run I results on diffractive dijets with Kristal Mauritz, and diffractive W/Z with Linda Coney:

Hard Single Diffraction in pbarp Collisions at root-s = 630 and 1800 GeV
hep-ex/9912061, FERMILAB-Pub-99/373-E (see LANL preprint server or PS
Phys. Lett. B {531}, 52 (2002)
Observation of Diffractively Produced W and Z Bosons in pbarp Collisions at sqrt{s} = 1800 GeV Phys. Lett. B {574}, 169 (2003); FERMILAB-Pub-03/233-E, hep-ex/0308032 PS.

We are in the final stages of several Run II diffractive analyses (papers soon!).

I spent many years on the trigger board, which decides which data to write to tape. Previously, I was co-convener of the QCD group and Run I physics analysis group. We brought several QCD analyses to publication. Here is a full list of D0 Publications.

I also convened and chaired the inaugural Run II Trigger Panel which constructed the first Run II trigger list and was a convener of the Diffractive and Color Coherence Working Group at the QCD Run II workshop. I have helped organize major international conferences in Brazil (co-chair of LISHEP 2002.) and at Fermilab (organizing committee for Small-x 2003)

International Linear Collider

ATLAS won't start operating until 2007 or so, but our even longer term future is under study and UTA colleagues Andy White and Jae Yu have taken leading roles in Linear Collider R&D.

Andrew Brandt