Dr Jordy Degens appointed for new ATLAS role
Dr Jordy Degens has been appointed convener of the 30-strong tau Reco and ID group, the team that is responsible for the tau lepton identification in ATLAS. Taus are crucial to both the overall ATLAS physics programme and Liverpool's physics analyses, playing a key role in Higgs self-coupling measurements and searches for new physics, including Super symmetry, dark matter and leptoquarks.
The most efficient way to detect taus is to use their leptonic decays, as the muon or electron in the final state is easy to trigger on and detect, however this only happens ~35% of the time. In this role, Jordy will oversee the reconstruction and identification of hadronically decaying tau leptons, supervising multiple students. This is a much more challenging decay mode, but benefits from a higher branching fraction, since nearly 65% of taus decay hadronically. He will lead efforts to develop a new tau tagger using advanced machine learning in Run 3 and study tau reconstruction performance for the forthcoming high luminosity (HL-LHC) run, ensuring optimal identification in the challenging HL-LHC environment with the Liverpool-built ITK tracker.