faculty

Ben Carlson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Physics
805.565.7015

Office Location

WH 324

Office Available

M/W/F  1 - 2 pm

T/Th  2 - 3 pm

Specialization(s)

Experimental Particle Physics

Biography/Details

Ben earned his Ph.D. in physics from Carnegie Mellon in 2015. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh until 2021, when he joined the Westmont faculty. His area of research is experimental high energy physics, and he works on the ATLAS experiment in Geneva Switzerland. In particular, he looks for hints of new particles in decays of the Higgs boson. Ben also works on the ATLAS trigger system, which determines which collisions should be saved in a fraction of a second. He was awarded an NSF grant in 2022, which he uses to support student contributions to the ATLAS experiment.

Personal webpage: https://www.benjamintcarlson.com/

Publications

    Stephen Roche, Quincy Bayer, Benjamin Carlson, William Ouligian, Pavel Serhiayenka, Joerg Stelzer, Tae Min Hong, "Nanosecond anomaly detection with decision trees for high energy physics and real-time application to exotic Higgs decays," submitted (2023). arXiv: 2304.03836

   B. T. Carlson, Q. Bayer, T.M. Hong, S.T. Roche, “Nanosecond machine learning regression with deep boosted decision trees in FPGA for high energy physics,” Journal of Instrumentation 17 P09039 (2022). arXiv: 2207.05602.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Search for invisible Higgs-boson decays in events with vector-boson fusion signatures using 139 fb-1 of proton-proton data recorded by the ATLAS experiment,” Journal of High Energy Physics 08 (2022) 104. arXiv: 2202.07953.

    Benjamin Carlson, Tao Han, Sze Ching Iris Leung, “Higgs to charm quarks in vector boson fusion plus a photon,” Phys. Rev. D 104 073006 (2021). arXiv: 2105.08738.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Observation of electroweak production of two jets in association with an isolated photon and missing transverse momentum, and search for a Higgs boson decaying to invisible particles at 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector,” The European Physical Journal C 82 105 (2022). arXiv: 2109.00925.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Performance of the ATLAS Level-1 topological trigger in Run 2,” The European Physical Journal C 82 7 (2022). arXiv: 2105.01416.

    Tae Min Hong, Benjamin Carlson, Brandon Eubanks, Stephen Racz, Stephen Roche, Joerg Stelzer, Daniel Stumpp, “Nanosecond machine learning event classification with boosted decision trees in FPGA for high energy physics,” Journal of Instrumentation 16 P08016 (2021). arXiv: 2104.03408.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Performance of the ATLAS missing transverse momentum triggers for the ATLAS detector,” Journal of High Energy Physics 2020, 80 (2020). arXiv: 2005.09554.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Performance of the upgraded PreProcessor of the ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger,” Journal of Instrumentation 15 (2020) P11016. arXiv: 2005.04179.

    ATLAS Collaboration, “Searches for electroweak production of supersymmetric particles with compressed mass spectra in sqrt(s) = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector,” Phys. Rev. D 101, 052005 (2020). arXiv: 1911.12606.