Dr Vakhtang (Vato) Kartvelishvili
Room: B31 Physics Building
Tel: +44 1524 593069
UK: (01524) 593069
Fax: +44 1524 844037
UK: (01524) 844037
EMail: v.kartvelishvili_at_lancaster.ac.uk
Lecturer
Research Interests: experimental high-energy particle
physics, phenomenology of elementary particles.
At present, I am a member of the ATLAS
collaboration, building one of the general-purpose detectors at the LHC collider at CERN , Geneva.
My work in ATLAS is divided into three activities:
- Bremsstrahlung recovery of
electron and positron tracks measured by the ATLAS Inner Detector. Electrons and positrons are very light particles and easily
radiate photons when passing through the detector, thus losing energy
and changing the direction of propagation. The aim is to
test and improve various methods of recovering the initial
energy/momentum of such tracks, based on the information provided by the
Inner Detector and the Electromagnetic Calorimeter.
We have created a software package which does Dynamic Noise Adjustment (DNA)
in the Kalman filter and successfully recovers a significant
fraction of radiating electron tracks during reconstruction.
This activity is crucial for successful observation and measurement of various
physics processes that include high energy electrons and positrons in
the final state, such as the production of heavy quarkonium states and Z bosons, as well as Higgs and Supersymmetry searches.
- Preparations to search for
the manifestation of Supersymmetry (SUSY) in the shape of high
mass narrow resonances in the muli-jet system. If observerd, such
resonances could mean that bound states of two gluinos (supersymmetric
partners of gluons) are being produced. The biggest challenge is the
huge background coming from the "usual" sources of jets with high
transverse momenta, such as gluon-gluon and quark-gluon scattering
described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In order to succeed, we
will need a highly selective and efficient event selection procedure
and the highest possible resilution in the invariant mass of the
system.
- Preparations to measure direct production of
heavy quarkonium states - one of the few physics channels accessible during the
commissionning run of the LHC collider. This measurement is interesting
from physical point of view, as a similar process observed at the Tevatron
is still to be fully understood. However, due to the nature of the J/psi and
Upsilon states, this process is also extremely valuable as a means of understanding
the preformance of the detector, check and improve the alighment and the calibration
of various sub-detectors and estimate trigger efficiencies.
Details of these and other activities can be found in my publications
in particle theory/phenomenology.
Prior to joining Lancaster and ATLAS, I was a amember of the OPAL
collaboration at CERN. Here is the list of my OPAL
publications.
Some time ago I wrote a program for data unfolding, GURU, which is
based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the response matrix,
and is widely
used in various analyses by a number of experiments, including
ALEPH, CLEO, L3 and OPAL. Click here to download.
Teaching
profile:
In 2006/07 academic year I gave lectures to physics majors in the
following courses:
- PHYS221
- Electromagnetism (second year).
- PHYS311
- Particle Physics (third year).
Last modified: 4 May, 200429 January, 2007