[APEX] Opportunities for students on APEX

[Natalia Toro]

Dear APEX and Hall A collaborators,

We are writing to inquire if any one has graduate students who would be
interested in working on the APEX experiment.  As most of you know, APEX
was among the PAC 41 experiments prioritized for early running and is
preparing for a potential 2016 run.  Several projects involved in this
preparation would provide excellent training opportunities for students,
and would prepare them for Masters and Ph.D. theses.


As a reminder, APEX will search for “dark photons”, a new, massive force
carrier with very weak couplings to ordinary electrically charged matter.
 The experiment will cover an important region of unexplored parameter
space, motivated by theoretical considerations and data anomalies that
suggest interactions of dark photons with the Universe’s dark matter. The
high sensitivity of APEX will permit a search for an A' motivated by the
muon g-2 anomaly, even if the A' decay branching ratio to Standard Model
particles is as low as 1%.

Key projects in the preparation for APEX include:
– Target: Development of the lifter and of target modifications appropriate
for all run settings
– Testing newly constructed SciFi detectors for optics calibration and its
implementation
– Analysis of the radiation in the Hall and design of the shielding
– Developing high-rate track reconstruction algorithm for VDC
– Field mapping of the newly constructed APEX septum (arriving to JLab in
October)

All projects should start very soon to allow timely preparation of the run.
We anticipate 2-3 Ph.D. theses and up to 4-5 Masters theses based on data
from the full APEX run.  Ph.D. theses would focus on several aspects of the
physics analysis (understanding the QED trident spectrum, the
resonance-search analysis in each of the four settings, and statistical
combination of different settings).  Masters thesis projects would be
possible on each of the major components of APEX (e.g. septum, target,
radiation shielding, SciFi detectors & their use in optics calibration, VDC
track reconstruction, particle ID).  A few of the Masters projects could be
completed with existing data before the full APEX run.  Now is a great time
for a student to get involved with APEX and gain expertise for such
projects!

If you have a qualified and interested student, please email Bogdan
Wojtsekhowski to coordinate.

Thanks and best regards,
Rouven Essig,
Philip Schuster,
Natalia Toro,
Bogdan Wojtsekhowski
(APEX spokespeople)
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