Bertrand Pascal Christian Martin Dit Latour

Position

Researcher, ATLAS experiment at CERN

Affiliation

Research

I am working on high-energy experimental particle physics in the ATLAS experiment.
ATLAS is a huge particle detector that is installed 100 m underground in the Geneva area (Switzerland). It records data from proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our goal is to study the interactions between elementary particles of the Standard Model (SM), and look for new phenomena.

One of my main research fields is the search for Supersymmetry. It is a theoretical model that predicts the existence a super-partner for each SM particle, with a different spin (quantum number). My favourite hunt is the search for "squarks" and "gluinos" (partners of the quarks and gluons) in events with jets of hadrons, tau leptons, and missing transverse momentum carried by "neutralinos". Taus are "similar" to electrons, but much heavier, and therefore decay shortly after they are produced, leaving specific signatures in our tracking and calorimeter detectors.

I am involved in the ATLAS trigger system which allows the experiment to cope with the enormous proton-proton collision rate (1 collision event 25 nanoseconds) and reduces the rate at which we record the events to disk for data analysis (about 1 event every millisecond). I am developing software algorithms to detect tau lepons in the trigger system.

I also develop algorithms for reconstructing and identifying tau leptons in the offline reconstruction of recorded data, which is a more detailed reconstruction than what we can afford to run in the trigger due to timing constraints. Most of these algorithms employ machine learning techniques.

Publications
Academic article
Abstract
Errata
Editorial

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Projects

ATLAS experiment