CHANDIGARH, October 18 : Panjab University (PU), Chandigarh doctoral student in Department of Physics, Monika Mittal has won the prestigious Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) achievement award for the
year 2014. Monika is pursuing her Ph.D. under the supervision of PU Prof. Manjit Kaur and TIFR, Prof. Shashi K. Dugad.
Monika Mittal is the first and the only Indian student to receive this award. HCAL achievements awards are one of the prestigious awards within the CMS community involving more than 3,000 scientists, engineers, and students from 172 institutes of 40 countries. Every year one doctoral student and one post-doctoral fellow, who have worked extraordinarily towards the detector are awarded with this honor. This is not only an
award but also a motivation for the young colleagues to participate actively and come forward with new ideas and implement them to good quality physics.
It may be recalled that Physics Department is a member of the CMS collaboration at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, which discovered the Higgs Boson and was cited for the discovery in the Nobel Prize for Physics in the year 2013. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving more than 3,000 scientists, engineers, and students from 172 institutes in 40 countries.
Monika has been awarded for her extensive and consistent work on all aspects of the upgrade project of Outer Hadron Calorimeter (HO), a sub-detector of Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) since she joined as a Ph.D. student in December, 2010. More than 100 people including scientists, engineers and students have worked on this sub-detector.
The HO sub-detector is an integral part of the CMS detector, which has been exclusively built by two Indian institutions namely TIFR, Mumbai and Physics Department, PU. Designed to exclusively measure the energy of hadrons, the particles composed of quarks and gluons, the important task in HO upgrade where she has contributed are:
1. Participation in test-beams carried out at H2 beam-line at CERN (2011 and 2012) for
studying response of SiPM in HO.
2. Analysis of test-beam data to study the effect of non-linearity of SiPM
3. Quality control and Installation of HO hardware in CMS detector.
4. Simulation of HO response to high pt jets
5. Commissioning of HO detector using cosmic data collected during global runs in 2013
and 2014.