Harshul Gupta and Jongho Lee named as Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholar at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center (LPC) for 2026
Introduction
UIC PhD students Jongho Lee and Harshul Gupta have been named Meenakshi Narain Graduate Scholar at the Fermilab Large Hadron Collider Physics Center (LPC) for 2026. This program is aimed to support exceptional Graduate Students from the US Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) institutions, by allowing them to pursue thesis research opportunities at the Fermilab LPC under the mentorship of resident LPC scientists. Both students work with Associate Professor Corrinne Mills analyzing data collected by the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proton-proton accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland and developing instrumentation for future colliders.
Harshul Gupta will develop the physics case for the smartpixels upgrade of the CMS detector using precision measurements of b-quark particles and launch a search for new heavy Higgs bosons using new CMS data. The smartpixels project integrates intelligence directly on the readout chip, and the resulting data reduction may enable pixel detector information to be used for the first time by CMS in the first layer of decision making on which events to keep after every proton-proton collision. The heavy Higgs boson search is motivated by the puzzle of matter-antimatter asymmetry and how the matter of the universe survived after the Big Bang, and will employ modern machine-learning techniques.
Jongho Lee will perform critical quality control for production of the Endcap Timing Read Out Chip (ETROC) for the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade of the CMS detector, building on expertise developed over the last five years. Fermilab is the primary site for this work, which will significantly enhance the capability of CMS to identify particles from the primary proton-proton collision among the 200 simultaneous ones of every “bunch crossing” of the LHC beams. Jongho will also develop “taggers” to identify and discriminate between high-momentum W and Z bosons that decay to a collimated pair of quarks. This work will use state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, such as Particle Transformer or other graph-based networks. If successful, this tool will dramatically improve the measurements of associated production of Higgs bosons with the W and Z bosons at high momentum, an important test of the Standard Model.