Room: B31 Physics Building
Tel: +44 (0)1524 593069
Fax: +44 (0)1524 844037
EMail: v.kartvelishvili_at_lancaster.ac.uk

Member of the Lancaster Particle Physics Research Group

Research Interests

experimental high-energy particle physics, phenomenology of elementary particles.

At present, I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration, building one of the general-purpose detectors at the LHC collider at CERN, Geneva.

My work in ATLAS is divided into three activities:

• Bremsstrahlung recovery of electron and positron tracks measured by the ATLAS Inner Detector. Electrons and positrons are very light particles and easily radiate photons when passing through the detector, thus losing energy and changing the direction of propagation. The aim is to test and improve various methods of recovering the initial energy/momentum of such tracks, based on the information provided by the Inner Detector and the Electromagnetic Calorimeter. We have created a software package which does Dynamic Noise Adjustment (DNA) in the Kalman filter and successfully recovers a significant fraction of radiating electron tracks during reconstruction. This activity is crucial for successful observation and measurement of various physics processes that include high energy electrons and positrons in the final state, such as the production of heavy quarkonium states and Z bosons, as well as Higgs and Supersymmetry searches.
• Preparations to search for the manifestation of Supersymmetry (SUSY) in the shape of high mass narrow resonances in the muli-jet system. If observerd, such resonances could mean that bound states of two gluinos (supersymmetric partners of gluons) are being produced. The biggest challenge is the huge background coming from the "usual" sources of jets with high transverse momenta, such as gluon-gluon and quark-gluon scattering described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In order to succeed, we will need a highly selective and efficient event selection procedure and the highest possible resilution in the invariant mass of the system.
• Preparations to measure direct production of heavy quarkonium states - one of the few physics channels accessible during the commissionning run of the LHC collider. This measurement is interesting from physical point of view, as a similar process observed at the Tevatron is still to be fully understood. However, due to the nature of the J/psi and Upsilon states, this process is also extremely valuable as a means of understanding the preformance of the detector, check and improve the alighment and the calibration of various sub-detectors and estimate trigger efficiencies.

Details of these and other activities can be found in my publications in particle theory/phenomenology.

Prior to joining Lancaster and ATLAS, I was a amember of the OPAL collaboration at CERN. Here is the list of my OPAL publications.

Some time ago I wrote a program for data unfolding, GURU, which is based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the response matrix, and is widely used in various analyses by a number of experiments, including ALEPH, CLEO, L3 and OPAL. Click here to download.

Teaching profile

In 2006/07 academic year I gave lectures to physics majors in the following courses:

• PHYS221 - Electromagnetism (second year).
• PHYS311 - Particle Physics (third year).