Prize Recipient

Jean-Francois Arguin
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

"Measurement of the Top Quark Mass with In Situ Jet Energy Scale Calibration using Hadronic W Boson Decays at CDF-II"

I was born in 1976 in Chicoutimi, Qc, Canada and lived most of my life in Quebec City. I completed with undergraduate degree in Mathematical-Physics in 1998 at the Université de Montréal. I became interested in experimental particle physics in the last year of my B.Sc., which brought me to study charm physics at the Babar experiment. I completed an M.Sc. on BaBar from the Université de Montréal in 2000.

I then joined the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration that studies the proton-antiproton collisions of the most powerful collider to date, the Tevatron. My doctorate studies were conducted at the University of Toronto under the supervision of professor Pekka K. Sinervo. I studied the top quark at CDF, by far the most massive known particle to date. I devised a method to measure precisely the mass of the top quark by reducing the uncertainty in measuring the energy of the jets that arise from the decay of top quarks. This method yielded the most precise measurement of the top quark mass to date, which in turn provided unprecedented constraints on the Higgs boson mass, the last particle predicted by the Standard Model that has yet to be observed. This work was awarded the URA Thesis Award at Fermilab.