Dr. Todd Adams
Dr. Todd Adams is a professor of physics. He joined the Florida State University faculty in 2001. Dr. Adams’ research is in the field of particle physics, also known as high energy physics. The goal is to understand the most basic particles and forces in nature. Prof. Adams currently works on the CMS experiment at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN collides beams of protons at the highest energies ever achieved within a laboratory. During the initial LHC data period (2010-2012), CMS (along with its competitor ATLAS) discovered the Higgs boson.
Dr. Adams’ current research is focused on the pursuit of signs of new physics using data from the CMS experiment. He is currently seeking evidence for new, heavy, charged particles in the CMS data. This work (in collaboration with a small group of researchers from around the world) has resulted in multiple publications in premier journals. He is also searching for new physics in events with three photons as predicted by a model created by Prof. Takemichi Okui (FSU). In addition, Dr. Adams leads the effort of the FSU CMS group related to the maintenance and understanding of the performance of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter.
Dr. Adams has guided the research of numerous undergraduate and graduate students (including four Ph.D.’s awarded). He is co-author of more than 1000 peer-reviewed publications as a member of collaborations at Brookhaven National Lab, Fermi National Accelerator Lab (Fermilab), and CERN. In 2009-2010, Dr. Adams served as Chair of the Fermilab Users Executive Committee, representing the 2000 users of the laboratory.
Previously Dr. Adams worked on the D0 experiment at Fermilab (2001-2012). There he developed the first search for long-lived particle decays (published in Physical Review Letters). He also worked with one of his graduate students to make the first D0 measurement of the top quark decaying into a tau lepton (and other particles). This was incorporated into three separate papers related to top quark production and charged Higgs boson searches. In 2007-2009, he was the co-leader of the D0 New Phenomena physics group that produced approximately one quarter of the experiment’s papers during that time. Prior to coming to FSU, Dr. Adams was a post-doctoral researcher at Kansas State University where he worked on the NuTeV experiment (Fermilab) studying neutrino physics. His Ph.D. research was a search for exotic mesons with Brookhaven Experiment E852.
Dr. Adams is a graduate of Hope College (B.S. 1991) and the University of Notre Dame (M.S. 1994, Ph.D. 1997). For more information on Prof. Adams' research, see his webpage.