academia
My academic story
Ecuadorian, experimental particle physicist, currently working for Carnegie Mellon University at the CMS Experiment at CERN. My area of expertise is in particles decaying hadronically. I am interested in searches with jets, specially in the boosted regime.
The short version
I come from South America, Ecuador specifically, but I have been outside my beautiful country for a while now. The reason? I am in love with science, and unfortunately, I cannot do what I am passionate about in my own country. What am I passionate about? Well, that’s easy. I am passionate about particle physics, experimental particle physics specifically. At a young age, I read about CERN and the goals that they were pursuing, and I got fascinated. After that, it was decided that I wanted to work at CERN, and I wanted to become a particle physicist.
However, becoming a scientist is not as easy as you might think, especially coming from developing countries. Being smart or capable is not enough. In my experience, being in the right place at the right time is equally crucial as being smart.
Fortunately for me, I had the luck of meeting friendly, brilliant, and selfless people who helped me on my way through. Working like there is no tomorrow, luck, and meeting the right people are what made me the person I am today. And I am not even halfway through this journey!
My academic life
My Postdoctoral Research
Carnegie Mellon University - USA
Currently working on 4b final states.
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH-Zurich) - Switzerland
I studied the production of the top quarks and the Higgs boson, where the tops decay in the semileptonic and dileptonic channels and the Higgs decay to a pair of b-quarks in the case of high transverse momentum Higgs. Additionally, my research focused on jets. I lead the efforts inside the CMS collaboration in jet algorithms, jet substructure, and tagging tools and studying pileup mitigation techniques inside the CMS trigger. I worked on unfolding data jet quantities related to high transverse momentum jets.
My Graduate Research
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - USA
My research was based on boosted jets for Run II of the LHC, under the supervision of Prof. Eva Halkiadakis. In general, when one particle is produced at rest or with low momentum and decays into two quarks, its decay particles will have showers of particles (or jets) that we will be able to reconstruct separated. In the case of boosted particles, i.e., not produced at rest, their products will be more collimated, and we will reconstruct them as a single jet. I studied these boosted objects to differentiate between regular jets or jets with some internal structure (or substructure). From the theory point of view, I tested one variation of supersymmetry (SUSY). In the simplest version of SUSY or MSSM, each SUSY particle will decay into one SUSY particle and an SM particle (conserving what we call R-parity). But it could be that Nature does not want to conserve this quantum number, and R-parity will be violated (RPV). In those cases, a SUSY particle may decay into two SM particles. (In this oversimplified summary, I am omitting a lot of things, for more info, please read SUSY Primer) Link to thesis.
My Undergraduate Research
Escuela Politécnica Nacional - Ecuador
For my undergraduate thesis, I searched exotic particles, colorons decaying into a pair of top quarks, i.e., a topology with four tops in the final state. This project was supervised by Dr. Francisco Yumiceva (Fermilab, currently at FIT). I performed this analysis from scratch: I generated a private production of a pair of heavy scalar bosons in Madgraph5, Hadronized my sample with Pythia8, passed it through CMSSW Fast Simulation, compared the signal with background and data, and studied the best strategy to analyze my signal. Two analyses have been performed: a simple cut and count analysis and multivariate analysis using Boosted Decision Trees. Finally, we found the first limits in the Standard Model four quark tops production and the pair production of the heavy scalar boson GH. Link to thesis.