MARKUS KLUTE: Welcome to this short recording
of our 8.701 lecture.
With this short discussion, I want
to introduce the teaching staff to this course, the instructor,
which is myself, Markus Klute, and our TA Justin.
So I am faculty in the physics department since 2009.
I received my diploma, which is my undergraduate study,
in Germany and also my PhD from the University in Bonn.
I-- with research on the OPAL experiment, which
is an experiment on the large electron positron collider
at CERN, on the ATLAS experiment, which
is in the Large Hadron Collider, also at CERN, and also
on the D0 experiment, which was one of the experiments
at the Tevatron in Chicago at Fermilab.
So after my PhD, I joined MIT as a postdoc, and later
as a research scientist.
And I worked on the CDF experiment
at the Tevatron and the CMS experiment
at the Large Hadron Collider.
In 2007, I accepted a faculty position in Germany,
where I spent about a year, before coming back to MIT.
It's not a surprise-- this is CV--
that I-- my interest is in particle physics
at the energy frontier.
I work on design, the construction,
the commissioning of detectors.
We made major contribution to the hydronic calorimeter
in CMS and also the data acquisition system.
Most recently, I was leading the software and computing project
within the CMS experiment.
Most exciting-- the physics.
And in 2012, we were able to discover the Higgs
boson with the CMS experiment.
And so ATLAS had a similar experience.
And since then, we were able to look more deeply, more closely
into how the Higgs boson--
case.
We were able to show couplings to W and Z bosons,
to photons via loops of top quarks and W bosons.
But then we looked into whether or not
Higgs bosons couple of fermions like electrons.
So we were able to show couplings to taus--
those are the heaviest brothers of the electrons--
and most recently, couplings of Higgs
bosons to muons, which are second-generation particles.
So this exploitation and exploration of the Higgs boson
is really at the center of my research portfolio.
We don't just spend our time analyzing the data
from the LHC, but we also look whether or not
new machines can teach us important information
about the Higgs boson.
When I'm not doing research, I have a little family
who I like to spend time with.
I used to play soccer quite a bit, and also tennis.
But when you get older, those kind of contact interactions
are not very useful for you anymore.
You get injured quite a bit.
So I left it to the running part of those activities.
And I picked up running quite a bit.
In a couple of weeks into the semester,
everyone, my and the first virtual Boston Marathon--
so some of those videos might have a little bit of a fighting
face in front of you.
But I hope everything is going well.
Our teaching TA is Justin.
Justin is a graduate student in my group.
He's in the second year.
He took this very class with Mike Williams last fall.
So he should be well-prepared to guide you and answer
your questions.
He received his undergraduate degree
from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where he was working on the g-2 experiment.
We'll probably talk about those kind of experiments
later in the class as well.
Recently, he has been taking up running as well.
But he spends, also, time on rowing and hiking.
So we, both of us, look forward to meeting you
in this first class on Tuesday and hope
that we have a good time together with 8.701.