Professor of Physics, UCSD

Vivek in Big Sur

I am a Professor in the Physics department at the University of California at San Diego. My research is in the field of Experimental Particle Physics.

I came to UCSD in March 1995, after five years as a post-doctoral fellow on the ALEPH experiment at CERN.  In electron-positron collision near the Z boson mass (91 Billion electron Volts) , I discovered two new sub-atomic particles  made of the beauty quark. The meson I discovered is called the Bs because it is composed of the beauty and strange (anti)quarks. The Lambda-B baryon I discovered is a heavy cousin of the proton with a mass five times larger. This baryon is so massive bacause it contains the b quark. I discovered that it lives shorter than predicted by theory.

 

My group at UCSD played a major role in the discovery of CP violation in the decay of neutral B mesons with the BaBar detector at SLAC. My student Shahram Rahatlou recieved the American Physical Society's award for the best Ph.D thesis in Experimental Particle Physics for 2004.

I am now planning an all out assault in search of the Higgs Particle at the LHC with the CMS detector.