Research Interests:

Prof. Neu's research interests focus on understanding the fundamental building blocks of the Universe.

The Universe is made up of bits of matter. These bits of matter interact through forces. To understand the Universe, one must understand the set of fundamental particles that comprise the Universe -- the bits -- and how those particles interact -- the forces. The behavior of the fundamental particles and their interactions manifest themselves in ways that are familiar to us (influencing phenomena in the everyday world, including light and electricity and other common things) and ways that are less so (influencing phenomena on much smaller scales, including nuclear decay, and phenomena on much larger scales, including the rotation of galaxies, and the birth and fate of the Universe).

Studies of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe pertain to a branch of science called particle physics. Particle physics has evolved rapidly over the last half-century. Experimental and theoretical efforts have worked in tandem and culminated in a very successful picture of the fundamental world known as the Standard Model. This model is a triumph of modern science; its predictive powers have been tested and verified over many orders of magnitude of the energy spectrum. That being said the Standard Model, as we know it, is incomplete.

Prof. Neu is particularly interested in one of the open questions of the Standard Model: How do the fundamental particles acquire mass and why do they have the masses they possess? In the Standard Model particles acquire mass through their interaction with a scalar field called the Higgs field. Without this Higgs field the values of the masses of the fundamental particles essentially need to be put in by hand to make the model work. Such a solution is unsatisfying. Hence the validity of the Higgs mechanism has much to do with the ultimate credibility of this generally otherwise successful Standard Model. More importantly, though, it is incumbent on those who want to understand the Universe's building blocks to understand the origin of mass.

Besides the imposition of mass to the fundamental particles, the Higgs mechanism has an additional consequence: the existence of an observable scalar particle known as the Higgs boson. The observation of this particle would validate the Higgs mechanism as the source of mass and bolster confidence in the Standard Model. However, despite decades of pursuit, this particle has eluded discovery.

Prof. Neu is in the hunt. As an experimental particle physicist, he participates in the search for the Higgs by colliding known particles together at the highest energies produced by man in the hopes of creating this new form of matter. If produced in one of these collisions, this new form of matter leaves a tell-tale signature from its decay products; it is the challenge of such experimental efforts to collect these events, reconstruct this signature and separate this source of events from other sources -- more mundane processes that leave similar signatures. Massive particle detectors are built to help accomplish this feat, with unique electronics designed to collect these signatures; novel data analysis techniques are then developed and employed for identifying events consistent with Higgs production.

He collaborates on experiments at particle colliders at two facilities. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, he works on the experiment Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) that analyzes collisions of protons and anti-protons traveling at nearly the speed of light. These colliding beams are provided by a particle accelerator called the Tevatron, currently the highest energy particle collider ever built. The Tevatron will soon be overtaken at the energy frontier by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a proton-proton collider located in the French-Swiss countryside at the leading European particle physics laboratory, CERN. The LHC will collide particles together at 7 times the energy of the Tevatron. There Prof. Neu will work on an experiment called the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), whose primary mission objective is the discovery of the Higgs. It is his hope that he can contribute to the discovery of the Higgs at the Tevatron or LHC experiments.

His interests in collider physics experiments extend beyond the Higgs to include studies of the production and decay of the top quark, the most massive of the quark family members. The unique location of the top quark on the spectrum of masses of the elementary particles could indicate that it plays a special role in the fundamental world. Its careful study could shed light on physics beyond the Standard Model.

Research Group(s):

High Energy Physics Group

Selected Publications:

Current and Recent Courses:

PHYS 3660: Quantum Physics II (Lecturer) Spring