Rick Van Kooten

Rick Van Kooten

Professor, Physics

Executive Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Education

  • Postdoctoral Positions, CERN Associate Scientist, DESY Research Scientist
  • Ph.D., Stanford University, 1990
  • B.Ap.Sc., University of Toronto, 1984

Research interests

elementary particle physics (experimental)

About Rick Van Kooten

My primary research interests concentrate on the study of particles containing b quarks and searches for new particles not described by our current Standard Model, such as those predicted by Supersymmetry and the "missing link" of the Standard Model: the Higgs boson. I have pursued these studies at the highest energy electron-positron colliders in the world, and am now continuing these studies at the energy frontier of hadronic colliders. I am also participating in planning for experimentation at the next generation of linear electron-positron colliders.

I am currently working on the D0 Collaboration, a large international group of physicists collecting data from proton-antiproton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 2 TeV, for a while longer, highest collision energy in the world, with the D0 Upgrade Detector at the Fermi National Laboratory outside of Chicago. Specifically, my group is involved in the scintillating fiber tracker and studies of b hadron physics such as B_s oscillations, B_s CP-violating phase, and new b baryons.

I have now begun work on the ATLAS Collaboration collecting data from proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of up to 14 TeV. The ATLAS detector is located on the Large Hadron Collider at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. My group is involved in the barrel transition radiation tracker, the high-level trigger, high-luminosity LHC upgrades (Level 1 trigger), and vector boson scattering, particularly concerning the high-energy behavior of the Higgs in the restoration of unitarity.