David Silvermyr
E-mail: david.silvermyr@hep.lu.se

ALICE-related page at CERN (old)

Work/Lund:   CERN:   BNL:
Lund University   CERN   Brookhaven National Laboratory
Department of Physics
Division of Particle Physics, Room A429
  Bat 23, R-006,
Mailbox E08300
  Building 510-C
Box 118, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden   CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland   Upton, NY 11973-5000, USA
Phone: +46 46 222 7674   +41 22 767 8956   +1 631 344-7815
Activities

I am an associate professor (sv: universitetslektor) at the Division of Particle Physics at the Physics Department of Lund University in Sweden. I work mainly in the field of High Energy Heavy-Ion Physics, on the ALICE experiment at the LHC. and the PHENIX experiment at RHIC.
Currently, we are working on the electronics for the ALICE Upgrades, in particular of the Time Projection Chamber, and the mass testing of the SAMPA chips. Some info is collected in the SAMPA folder. I teach several courses, notable the first-semester course on the Theory of Relativity, Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (FYSA01). Some info is collected in the FYSA01 folder. Students interested in bachelor or master projects related to our research are welcome to contact me or Peter Christiansen.

Previously, I was a staff scientist (Wigner fellow Sep 2003 - Sep 2005) with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I was a member of the High Energy Reactions/Heavy Ion Collisions group/task, which has a leading role in the construction and analysis of e.g. the PHENIX Muon Arms. The PHENIX Muon system is designed to study, among other things, charmonium and bottomonium spectroscopy and is a vital component in the PHENIX physics program, also for p+A (proton+nucleus) and spin physics (p+p). I mainly worked on J/ψ analysis until 2007.

From 2007 to 2014 I was mainly working on a large acceptance Electro-Magnetic Calorimeter (EMCal - ALICE-USA link) for the ALICE experiment at CERN. In 2005, we had our first beamtest at Fermilab (which turned out quite well), and in the spring of 2006, the Technical Proposal was submitted to CERN/LHCC.
We had a second beamtest at CERN SPS and PS in the fall of 2007 (and a third in 2010). From Jan. 2007 to late Feb. 2009, I was stationed at CERN, to work on the ALICE EMCAL; preparation work for the first installed SuperModules, mainly electronics and online-related activities. We had four SuperModules (~40% of total EMCAL detector) installed by late July, 2009, for the first LHC run. We installed the remaining six full SuperModules in early 2011, i.e. in time for the second LHC run. I was stationed at CERN again from April 2010 to March 2012 - mainly working on EMCal operations.

Previously, I was a post-doc with Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the P-25 group, which is another of the leading groups for the PHENIX Muon system.
For my PhD thesis, I worked on the PHENIX Pad Chambers and maintained this web page. Analysis of Pad Chamber data (with assistance from other detectors) resulted in the first PHENIX publication: PRL 86 (2001) 3500, preprint nucl-ex/0012008, which was also the first study of the centrality dependence of charged particle multiplicity at RHIC energies.
Another topic that I have a continued interest in is the physics of coherent peripheral interactions at relativistic heavy-ion colliders. For a few reviews see e.g. the following preprints: hep-ph/0112211 and hep-ex/0201034.

Background

I was born and raised in Sweden. I'm originally from Jönköping, and grew up and attended school in Vetlanda. My roots are in the small villages of Näshult (wiki) and Stenberga (wiki), located in the rural province of forests and lakes called Småland. I went to Lund University, and received my PhD at the division of Cosmic and Subatomic Physics, nowadays merged with particle physics into the division of Particle Physics. For my MSc and PhD theses, I worked on the experiments WA98 at the CERN SPS and PHENIX at RHIC, BNL. After completing my MSc and before starting on my PhD, I spent a summer as a student at CERN, working on OPAL. The analysis I did with secondary vertex reconstruction to estimate B hadron lifetimes later evolved into hep-ex/9901017 [Eur.Phys.J. C12 (2000) 609-626].
In the US, I lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico, not too far away from Santa Fe, and then between Oak Ridge, and Knoxville, in Tennessee. Two different but both scenic places, Jemez/Rocky mountains in the Southwest vs Smoky mountains in the Southeast.

Publications

Listing from INSPIRE, INSPIRE profile

ORCID, ResearcherID, Google scholar,

Here are some older talks and presentations I've made.

Here's a usually somewhat out-of-date curriculum vitae, and resume. My PhD genealogy tree can be found here.