We are herein requesting supplemental funds to support two additional graduate student for the University of Michigan High Energy Physics Program beginning in Fall 2000.  One student, Joseph Kuah, would be expected to contribute to our ATLAS Trigger Database effort in the coming year while transitioning fully into thesis work on the DZERO experiment. The other student would be expected to contribute to our ATLAS Muon Database effort for the coming year, before transitioning to thesis work in DZERO. Both students are known to us and have had experience in working within our program at CERN for at least one summer. Both are academically strong University of Michigan graduate students who have declared a desire to work within our group. In both cases, one or more faculty members within our group have indicated a desire to serve as their advisor/mentor.



Joseph Kuah was a sophomore undergraduate student in Engineering at the University of Michigan when he enrolled in an independent study project with Homer Neal in 1996. In that course he designed and built a comic ray test stand and investigated the azimuthal dependence of energetic cosmic rays. He also became involved in the p-p polarization studies being conducted by Neal at the time. Indeed, his role in that work was sufficiently substantive that he was included as an author on the 1998 Physics Letters paper published with Neal and Holger Nielsen . In summer 1998 Kuah accompanied Neal to CERN and worked with the DATCHA Group testing the MDT drift chamber prototypes in the UA-1 pit at CERN. In the following year (his first year as a Michigan graduate student), during which he worked with Jay Chapman, he played a significant role in the design and testing of the TDC electronics. In the next summer he worked with Jorgen Christenson at CERN testing prototype muon electronics front-end chips to certify them for full production. In the present Summer  he is working with Myron Campbell and Homer Neal on developing the framework for a Trigger Database for ATLAS. He is also becoming involved with a similar initiative for the DZERO experiment. Joseph is reaching the stage of needing to become fully integrated into his thesis work, which he wishes to do within DZERO. The difficulty is that Task K is not budgeted for an additional student at this time. We feel that it would be very unfortunate not to be able to support Kuah, given his demonstrated abilities and the prospects of his success in the DZERO program.



Georg Mikus is a student at the University of Michigan who, in his first year, worked for professor Len Sander,  a faculty member in condensed matter. In that role he gained considerable experience in Monte Carlo techniques. During this, his first summer term as a Michigan student, he is working at CERN along with Steven Goldfarb, a Michigan senior postdoc who is in coordinator of the ATLAS Muon Database effort. Georg has been very effective in developing the XML description of the muon detector, an important step in forming the overall ATLAS detector database. He developed a complete description of the Thin-Gap Chamber subsystem. This work will be used for the GEANT4 simulation of the muon end caps. In the coming year Georg would complete a  more detailed description of the TGCs and in addition he would would integrate this description into an automated process that translates the current detector description parameters into XML. He is highly dedicated, very talented, and tenaciously pursues projects until they are completed. He has indicated that he would like to pursue his thesis work in high energy physics with our DZERO group. Again, we are unable to commit support to him because we have no graduate student slots available. It would be most unfortunate to not be able to accommodate him within our program.



We note further that this is a remarkably fitting time for students to be joining a Tevatron experiment. We expect that each student will contribute service efforts to both ATLAS and DZERO over the next year. But they will also be able to begin immediately familiarizing themselves with DZERO physics so they will be well positioned to begin physics analysis early in the data running period. 



Our request is thus for support for two graduate students for one year. Of our current xxxx students, we expect that two will graduate in approximately one year.