Carlos Cocha has become the new Chair of SMARTHEP’s ESR Committee and will represent our ESRs for the next 12 months, replacing Jamie Gooding who held the post during 2023. Carlos is based at the University of Heidelberg and the focus of his PhD lies in unravelling the mysteries of Dark Matter, which despite constituting 85% of the total mass in the universe, its real nature is still unknown.
Focusing on the search for dark photons, a well-motivated dark matter force carrier candidate, his current project takes advantage of the recent upgrades to the LHCb detector- one of the primary detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)- offering an unprecedented opportunity to detect these hypothetical particles in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. It is crucial to detect the characteristic detector signature of these particles in real-time so that the collision event is written to disk. That’s why his efforts have centred on developing novel trigger algorithms to discern potential dark photon candidates that decay into electron-positron pairs.
In addition, the underlying kinematics of this decay produce very low momentum electrons which are difficult to reconstruct at the trigger level. Therefore, he has developed new trigger lines to select dark photon candidates by implementing a real-time multi-variational classifier at the trigger level or reconstructing very low momentum electrons leveraging upstream reconstruction algorithms. Both methods have shown a significant enhancement in the trigger efficiency while staying within the allowed throughput in the LHCb trigger. Furthermore, he has applied the techniques he developed to reconstruct dark photons to the reconstruction of soft photons coming from tau lepton and B meson decays, hoping that these developments can open new research venues to study these decays.
