Yongsheng Gao

Professor of Physics. Team Leader of CSU Fresno ATLAS Program at LHC of CERN

Office: McLane Hall #175A/B Office Phone: (559)278-4554 E-mail: yogao@csufresno.edu Department Phone: (559)278-2371 Postal Address: Department of Physics California State University, Fresno 2345 E. San Ramon Avenue Mail Stop MH37 Fresno, CA 93740-8031 U. S. A.

Research at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland:

• Search for new physics on the ATLAS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland.
• Team Leader of the CSU Fresno ATLAS program (2007 to present)
• My ATLAS research work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF): $802,034 grant from Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) (Award number: 2345092, from 4/1/2024 to 3/31/2027, PI), $300,000 grant from International Research Experience for Students (IRES) (Award number: 1854214, from 3/15/2019 to 2/29/2024, PI), $559,994 grant from Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) (Award number: 1505840, from 8/1/2015 to 7/31/2019, PI), $249,863 grant from International Research Experience for Students (IRES) (Award number: 1459240, from 8/1/2015 to 7/31/2018, PI), $510,999 grant from Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) (Award number: 1206123, from 6/1/2012 to 5/31/2015, PI), $620,000 grant from Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) (Award number: 0959141, from 3/1/2010 to 2/29/2012, PI), and $460,000 grant from Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) (Award number: 0853728, from 8/15/2009 to 7/31/2012, PI).

Research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) in Batavia, Illinois:

• Collaborating with FNAL physicists and sending students to work on neutrino and dark matter experiments at FNAL (2025 to present)
• Setting up CCD R&D and testing facility on CSU Fresno campus for dark matter research (2025 to present)
• My FNAL research work and activities have been supported by the Department of Energy (DOE): $900,000 grant from Reaching a New Energy Science Workforce (RENEW) High Energy Physics (HEP) program (from 1/1/2025 to 12/31/2027, PI),

Opportunities for California Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) Students to Work at CERN and FNAL during Summers with NSF and DOE grants

• Interested in doing research as part of CERN's ATLAS Experiment or FNAL's neutrino and dark matter experiments for upcoming summers with financial support from DOE and NSF grants? Click here for application information Opportunities for California MSI Students to Work at CERN and FNAL

My Current and Past Research Work:

• ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (2002 --- Present)

• Team leader of the ATLAS group at California State University, Fresno (Fresno State) (2007 -- present).

• Initiated and enrolled Fresno State as a collaborating institute of ATLAS and CERN (2007). Among all the 23 CSU campuses, Fresno State is the only one on ATLAS or CMS, the two flagship LHC experiments designed to search for new physics beyond current known physics frame work and discovered the Higgs boson (so-called "God" particle) on 7/4/2012.

• Build up CSU Nuclear and Particle Physics Consortium (NUPAC) which consists of 19 CSU campuses (Bakersfield, Channel Islands, Chico, Dominguez Hills, East Bay, Fresno, Humboldt, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, Pomona, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, San Marcos, Sonoma, and Stanislaus).

• Build up the first US ATLAS Tier 3 cluster on cloud with $250,000 Amazon AWS credits award from CSU Chancellors Office (1/2019 -- present).

• Search for new physics beyond current known physics framework from ATLAS data with di-jet final states (2011 -- present).

• Build up ATLAS Grid Computing Tier 3 cluster at Fresno State with NSF MRI award. The Fresno State ATLAS Tier 3 cluster, which consists of 408 cores and 210 TB of raw storage space, is located at the Fresno State IT data center and has been in operation for ATLAS simulations and physics analyses since April, 2011. The Fresno State ATLAS Tier 3 cluster was the first Tier 3 connected to US ATLAS Tier 2 centers on ATLAS CONNECT project and has been a testbed for ATLAS CONNECT.

• Develop new color-connection jet substructure variables for new physic searches, and new physics searches with jets in final state from ATLAS data (2010 to 2012): Talks at the ATLAS Standard Model, Higgs and Exotics Working Groups from 2010 to 2012.

• ATLAS performance studies, Particle identification (PID) fake rates using reflections of known physics processes from incoming real ATLAS data and their impacts on ATLAS physics (2006 to 2008): Talks at the ATLAS Standard Model, Higgs, Exotics, Electron/Photon, Jet/EtMiss, and Tau Working Groups from 2006 to 2008.

• Significance calculation and a new analysis method in searching for new physics at the LHC (2005 -- 2006): Talks at the ATLAS Higgs Working Group in 2005 and 2007. Published in European Physical Journal C45, 659 (2006). This work has been adopted by the ATLAS collaboration for Higgs and new physics searches from incoming ATLAS data.

• Electron/Pion Separation with LAr Barrel Module P15 using 2002 Testbeam Data (2002 -- 2003): ATLAS Note: ATL-LARG-2003-013, published in Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A550, 96 (2005)

• Supervise Fresno State postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students on ATLAS (2008 -- present)

• Supervise postdoc and graduate students at Southern Methodist University (SMU) on ATLAS: Ph.D Thesis advisor of Liang Lu who received his Ph.D in December, 2005. Liang was the first SMU Ph.D on ATLAS and is now the operation president of Bokee Information Technology Co. in Beijing, China

• Set up Computing Farm at SMU as one of the US ATLAS Grid Testbed sites (2003 -- 2004)

• Participate ATLAS Data Challenges through US ATLAS Grid Testbed (2003 -- 2004)

• ATLAS Silicon Microstrip Detector R&D: test FELIX front-end readout chip, beam test and signal/background measurements, published in Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A383, 245 (1996)

• CLEO Experiment at Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring (CESR) located at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (1996 --- 2006)

• Team Leader of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) CLEO group (2001 -- 2006)

• Precise Measurements of Form Factors of D0/D+ to K/pi e nu, and CKM Matrix Elements Vcs, Vcd. Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 251802 (2008), and Phys. Rev. D77, 112005(2008)

• Absolute Branching Fraction Measurements of Exclusive D0/D+ Semileptonic Decays: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 181802 (2005) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 181801 (2005)

• Wess-Zumino Current and the Structure of the decay Tau to K-K+Pi-nu: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 232001 (2004)

• Study of Tau to Three Charged Hadron Decays with CLEO III: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 181802 (2003)

• Supervise SMU postdoc Feng Liu on CLEO (2001 -- 2006). Liu is now project physicist at UC-Riverside

• Tracking Systematic Study with CLEO III Detector. CLEO CBX 02-13 by F. Liu and Y. Gao

• First Search for Flavor-Changing-Neutral-Current (FCNC) decay of D0 to GammaGamma: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 101801 (2003)

• First Observation of exclusive B to DK* and D*K* Decays: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 101803 (2002)

• Search for Flavor-Changing-Neutral-Current (FCNC) Processes B to l+l-K(*): Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 181803 (2001)

• Postdoctoral researcher of Harvard University CLEO group (1996 -- 2000)

• First Observation of hadronic b to u Transition: Published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2881 (2000)

• Coordinator of CLEO III Silicon Vertex Detector assembly/testing at Cornell University (1996 to 1999)

• Search for Color-Suppressed B Hadronic Decays: Published in Phys. Rev. D57, 5363 (1998)

• ALEPH Experiment at the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (1989 --- 1995)

• Ph.D student at University of Wisconsin-Madison (1988 -- 1995)

• Search for Charged Higgs Boson in Z Decays: Published in Phys. Lett. B241, 623 (1990)

• Charged Particle Pair Production Associated with a Lepton Pair in Z Decays: Published in Phys. Lett. B263, 112 (1991)

• A Precise Measurement of b Baryon Lifetime: Published in Phys. Lett. B357, 685 (1995) Ph.D Thesis

• Exclusive Reconstruction of /\b baryon: Published in Phys. Lett. B380, 442 (1996)

• Fresno State ATLAS Research Program

• My Publications (from INSPIRES HEP database)

• My CV (PDF format)

• My Recent Talks at High Energy Physics Conferences

Teaching at California State University, Fresno

• Fall 2015: Introduction to Particle Physics and ATLAS Experiment of LHC at CERN (PHYS 175T, online course to CSU NUPAC)

• Fall 2014: Introduction to Particle Physics and ATLAS Experiment of LHC at CERN (PHYS 175T, online course to CSU NUPAC)

• Spring 2014: Introduction to Particle Physics and ATLAS Experiment of LHC at CERN (PHYS 175T, online course to CSU NUPAC)

• Spring 2013: Physics Colloquium (PHYS 180)

• Fall 2012: Introduction to Particle Physics and ATLAS Experiment of LHC at CERN (PHYS 175T, online course to CSU NUPAC), General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL) and Physics Colloquium (PHYS 180)

• Spring 2012: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL) and Physics Colloquium (PHYS 180)

• Fall 2011: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL), ATLAS Research (PHYS 175-T), and Physics Colloquium (PHYS 180)

• Spring 2011: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL)

• Fall 2010: General Physics (PHYS 2A) and General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL)

• Spring 2010: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL)

• Fall 2009: Modern Physics (PHYS 102)

• Spring 2009: Particle Physics (PHYS 275T)

• Spring 2009: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL)

• Fall 2008: General Physics (PHYS 2A)

• Fall 2008: Introduction to High Energy Physics (Part II) (PHYS 175T-HEP)

• Spring 2008: General Physics (PHYS 2A) (Physics 2A)

• Spring 2008: Introduction to High Energy Physics (Part I) (PHYS 175T-HEP) (Physics 175T-HEP)

• Fall 2007: General Physics (PHYS 2A) (Physics 2A)

• Fall 2007: General Physics Lab (PHYS 4AL) (Physics 4AL)

Recent News Media Stories about Fresno State ATLAS Program

ATLAS Experiment

• ATLAS Home Page
• US ATLAS Home Page

Physics Papers

• INSPIRES HEP database
• LANL preprint Archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cornell University

Other Physics Related Sites (In case you are bored)

• The Particle Adventure: Fundamentals of Matter and Forces
• Explore the particles and the Universe (from CERN online resources)
• Antimatter: Mirror of the Universe
• The Nobel Prize in Physics
• How things work
• The Virtual Laboratory
• Physics 2000: Interactive Demos
• The Wonders of Physics
• Cartoons and Physics Questions (from Amherst College)