The Road to Discovery

John Alison received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. As a graduate student his primary focus was searching for and studying the Higgs Boson in the WW-channel. He is now a Fermi/McCormick fellow at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on an upgrade to the ATLAS trigger system, (FastTracKer), which is an electronics system that rapidly finds and reconstructs charged particles in the inner tracker. John's research interests include developing tools and algorithms used in the trigger and using the Higgs to probe for new physics.

Introduction and Theoretical Background.- The Large Hadron Collider.- The ATLAS Experiment.- Reconstruction and Commissioning.- Detector Alignment.- TRT Alignment.- Electron Identification.- WW Physics.- The Fake Factor Method.- WW Cross Section Measurement.