Christopher Hearty, Professor/IPP Principal Research Scientist

B.Sc. Simon Fraser University (82)
Ph.D. University of Washington (87)
Postdoctoral Researcher, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (87-94)

Hennings 268
604 822 9163 or 604 221 3228 (TRIUMF)
hearty@physics.ubc.ca

Experimental Particle Physics Research

I split my research time between heavy flavor and neutrino physics. Most recently, I have started developing a drift chamber for Super-B, a new e+e- collider approved by the Italian government in December 2010. This project will provide excellent opportunities for students to design, build, and commission a cutting edge particle physics detector. It will be similar in size to the one we built for BaBar.

Super-B will have 100x the luminosity of the extremely successful BaBar experiment, which completed data taking in 2008. We still lots of physics analysis to do. I am the principle investigator of BaBar Canada, and was Physics Analysis Coordinator for 2004-2005.

T2K is a long-baseline neutrino beam experiment searching for the transformation of muon-type neutrinos to electron type. We built major parts of the near detector here at TRIUMF, and are now analyzing the initial data.

Students

Here are the students I have worked with recently. I am looking for one or two new graduate students, and occasionally supervise undergraduate theses; a few possible projects are listed below. Please contact me for additional information.

Thesis Topics

Beam tests of a Super-B drift chamber prototype
Level 1 trigger algorithms for the Super-B drift chamber
Physics impact of tracking improvements from cluster counting
Physics impact of particle identification improvements from cluster counting
Decays of the Y(4S) to non-B B final states
Search for the light Higgs A0 decaying to c c-bar
Search for the light Higgs A0 decaying to e+e-
Search for the light Higgs A0 decaying to gamma gamma
Multihadronic final states in radiative decays of the Y(3S); search for the eta_b(2S)

Selected Publications

Time Projection Chambers for the T2K Near Detectors, to appear in Nucl. Instr. Meth. A (2011).
Search for low-mass Higgs boson in the radiative decays Y(3S)-->gamma A0, A0 --> tau+ tau-, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 181801 (2009).
Evidence for X(3872) --> psi(2S) gamma in B+/- --> X(3872) K+/- decays, and a study of B --> ccbar gamma K, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 132001 (2009).
Observation of the bottomonium ground state in the decay Upsilon(3S) ---> gamma eta(b), Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 071801 (2008).
Observation of a broad structure in the pi+ pi- J / psi mass spectrum around 4.26-Gev/c**2, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 142001 (2005).
Direct CP Violating Asymmetry in B0 -> K+pi- Decays, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 131801 (2004).
Observation of CP violation in the B0 meson system, B. Aubert et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 091801 (2001).
Measurement of J/psi production in continuum e+e- annihilations near sqrt(s) = 10.6 GeV, Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 162002 (2001).
The BABAR detector, B. Aubert et al, SLAC-PUB-8569, Nucl.Instrum.Meth.A479:1-116,2002.