About
Professor Zhou has led the decade long research project of the U.S. ATLAS muon detector development and construction for CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The ATLAS detector is used to search for the Higgs boson, the cornerstone of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism in the standard model, with very high-energy proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
Physicists including graduate students from the University of Michigan have participated in the design and construction of the ATLAS experiment, particularly, the largest precision muon spectrometer. They carried out many detailed physics studies to determine the discovery sensitivities with the ATLAS detector for many new physics processes. It is proven that the large precision muon detector built at the University of Michigan is crucial for the Higgs-like new boson discovery at the LHC.
Professor Zhou has played important leading roles in Higgs search programs from the LEP experiment (L3) to the LHC experiment (ATLAS) in the past two decades. In ATLAS, she and her students have concentrated on the physics analysis of the Higgs search in the Z-boson pair decay channel where a signal was observed at a mass of 126 GeV, thereby determining one of the key parameters of the Higgs boson. She is one of the leading physicists in ATLAS to measure the properties of the newly discovered boson.
Professor Zhou and her students also worked on the DZERO experiment at Tevatron to search for supersymetry particles and to perform precision measurements of the parameters predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. These studies have paved ways to search for new physics at the TeV energy scale at the LHC experiment.
Professor Zhou was elected as the Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2000 due to her major contributions in large precision muon detector development and research and in searching for the Higgs boson at LEP experiment.
Selected Publications
Large Precision Muon Detector for ATLAS, (B. Zhou), Nucl. Instr. & Meth. A 494, 464 (2002).
Direct Measurement of the W Boson Decay Width with the DZERO Experiment, by DZERO Collaboration (V. Abazov et al.), Physical Review D 66, 032008 (2002).
Search for the Standard Model Higgs Bosson in e+ e- Interactions at the Center of Mass Energy of 183 GeV, by L3 Collaboration (M. Acciarri et al.), Phys. Lett. B 431, 437 (1998).
The L3 Radiation Monitor, (S. Ahlen et al.), Nucl. Instr. Meth. A 369, 92 (1996).
Search for the SM Higgs at LEP with the L3 Detector, (Bing Zhou), DPF (World Scientific) 1, 467 (1993).
Searches for Non-Minimal Higgs Bosons in ZØ Decays, (L3 Collaboration), Z. Phys. C 57, 355 (1993).
