Professor of Physics

     Office:     5111 Broida Hall
     Phone:    (805) 893-8408
     Fax:        (805) 893-8597
     Email:     richman@charm.physics.ucsb.edu
     Mail:       Physics Department
                     University of California
                     Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9530

Research
 

My research is in experimental elementary particle physics, the exploration of the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions.

I am currently involved in two major projects, the CMS experiment at CERN and the BaBar experiment at SLAC. In BaBar I worked on the construction of the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) and on the analysis of rare B meson decays. I was Physics Analysis Coordinator of BaBar in 2003-2004 and Deputy Physics Analysis Coordinator in 2002-2003. In BaBar, we are addressing the driving issue of heavy-quark physics: CP violation and its origin. CP violation refers to a difference between the behavior of matter and antimatter. To study it, we can compare the rate for a process involving a set of particles with the rate for the same process in which each particle is replaced by its antiparticle. The papers listed below give more information on these topics. (Since I previously worked on the CLEO experiment at Cornell, some of the papers listed below are from that experiment.)

The CMS experiment is an exciting project to explore physics at the TeV energy scale, where new kinds of phenomena are expected to appear. We hope to explore the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, which endows many particles with masses, and to search for particles that could make up the dark matter inferred from astrophysical observations. The experiment is now under construction and will start operation in 2007. I am currently working on projects related to tracking, muons, and triggering. I welcome inquiries from students interested in becoming involved in these efforts!

I currently have two postdoctoral fellows, Tom Danielson and Jean-Roch Vlimant, and three graduate students, Tae-Min Hong, Michael Mazur, and Finn Rebassoo.

• Things I wish I'd known when I was a graduate student...that are related to particle physics (Lectures given at the BaBar Physics Analysis School), Feb 19--23, 2008 Lecture 1 and Lecture 2.
• Observation of the semileptonic decays B->D* tau anti-nu (tau) and evidence for B-> D tau- anti-nu(tau). Published in Phys.Rev.Lett. 100:021801, 2008; arXiv:0709.1698 (hep-ex) . This is part of the Ph.D. thesis work of my student Michael Mazur.
• Integrity of Data Samples and Results in High Energy Physics, Presentation to the National Academies Committee on Assuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in the Digital Era, Irvine, California, September 17, 2007
• Measurement of the branching fractions for B -> D tau nubar and B -> D* tau nubar. (Paper submitted to the European Physical Society Conference, EPS2007). This paper reports the first evidence for the decay B0bar -> D+ tau- nutaubar and the first observation of the decays B- -> D*0 tau- nutaubar. It is part of the Ph.D. thesis work of my student Michael Mazur.
• Thoughts on the DOE University Program in High Energy Physics , Presentation to the HEPAP Subpanel on the University Grants Program in High Energy Physics, SLAC, January 2007
• Radiative and Electroweak Penguin Decays of B Mesons, Talk presented at the 11th International Conference on B Physics at Hadron Colliders, Oxford University, September 2006
• Measurement of the branching fractions, rate asymmetries, and angular distributions in the rare decays B -> K l+l- and B -> K* l+ l-. (Phys. Rev. D73 (2006) 092001) The work for this paper was led by my postdoc Jeff Berryhill, who is now a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab. (Our other B->K(*)l+l- measurements are listed below.)
• Rare and Semileptonic Decays of B and K Mesons, Plenary session talk at the Particles and Nuclei International Conference, Santa Fe, October 2005
• My talk to the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), October 2005
• Realms of Exploration and Discovery in B Physics, A series of lectures on B physics that I gave at the Chinese Institute of High Energy Physics summer school in summer 2005.
• Photograph of the BaBar Detector, courtesy of Peter Ginter/SLAC.
• CMS experiment home page
• BaBar home page (for physicists)
• BaBar public page
• Matter-Antimatter Asymmetries: What have we learned?, a colloquium that I gave at MIT on BaBar on May 5, 2005.
• BaBar results from summer 2004, near the end of my term as Physics Analysis Coordinator.
• Photograph of the BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker before installation (.jpg)
• Another nice photograph of the BaBar SVT before installation (.ps)
• Evidence for the Rare Decay B->K*l+l- and Measurement of the B->Kl+l- Branching Fraction (pdf) . Members of our group, including Jeffrey Berryhill (postdoc) and Natalia Kuznetsova (graduate student), contributed heavily to this work, which was published in Physical Review Letters (Phys.Rev.Lett.91:221802,2003). Natalia is now an Assistant Professor at Hamilton College.
• Writeup of plenary talk on "Progress on Heavy-Quark Physics from BaBar, Belle, and CLEO" (for Proceedings of Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics, Quebec, May 2000.)
• Transparencies of plenary talk in Quebec on "Progress on Heavy-Quark Physics from BaBar, Belle, and CLEO"
• My talk about the UCSB HEP group at the HEPAP meeting at UCLA (July 2000).
• Web page for CLEO measurement of B->rho l nu. This analysis is part of the completed thesis work of one of my students, David Lange. David is now a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
• Preprint of new CLEO II PRD paper on B->rho l nu and Vub.
• Les Houches Lectures on Heavy-Quark Physics and CP Violation : these lectures are meant for graduate students and postdocs interested in heavy-quark physics.
• The BaBar Silicon Vertex Tracker : J.D. Richman, NIM A 409, 219 (1998). A short article on the new vertex detector.
• Leptonic and Semileptonic Decays of Charm and Bottom Hadrons : J.D. Richman and P.R. Burchat, Rev. Mod. Phys. 67, 893 (1995). A comprehensive discussion of these decay modes.
• Anders Ryd's thesis: ``Measurement of B Meson Semileptonic Decay Form Factors.'' Anders is currently Assistant Professor at Cornell University.
• Measurement of the Form Factors for B->D^* l nu : (CLEO Collab., J.E. Duboscq et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 3898 (1996)). This measurement is part of the completed thesis work of one of my students, Anders Ryd.
• Progress in Understanding Heavy Flavor Decays : J.D. Richman, plenary talk given at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, Warsaw, 1996.
• An Experimenter's Guide to the Helicity Formalism. A pedagogical description of the helicity formalism, which I wrote as a graduate student. Useful for calculating decay angular distributions.

I have taught particle physics (graduate and undergraduate), quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, analog and digital electronics, computer interfacing, senior lab, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and introductory physics. I have taught most of the courses listed below 2-3 times.

• Ph 128a (Senior Lab) syllabus-Fall 1998
• Ph 128b (Senior Lab) - Winter 1999
• Ph 125 (Elementary Particle Physics) - Spring 2000
• Ph 225ab (Graduate Elementary Particle Physics) - Fall and Winter 1993
• Ph 127a (Analog Electronics) - Fall 2000
• Ph 127b (Digital Electronics) - Winter 2003
• Ph 115a (Quantum Mechanics) - Winter 2002
• Ph 115b (Quantum Mechanics) - Spring 2002
• Ph 115c (Quantum Mechanics) - Fall 2001
• Ph 4 (Introductory Electromagnetism and Optics) - Fall 2005
• Ph 4 (Introductory Electromagnetism and Optics) - Winter 2006
• Ph 4 (Introductory Electromagnetism and Optics) - Winter 2007
• Ph 119a (Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics) - Fall 2007
• Ph 125 (Elementary Particle Physics) - Spring 2008