Pauline Gagnon

Senior Research Scientist
Elementary Particle/High Energy Physics

BS, Université du Québec à Montréal 1978
MS, Francisco State University 1988
PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz 1993
Postdoc, Carleton University; Center for Research in Particle Physics

Email: pauline.gagnon cern.ch

Curriculum Vitae
Personal Webpage

Dark matter, although of completely unknown origin, accounts for 25% of all matter in the universe, whereas regular matter inside stars and galaxies only make 5% of all matter. The rest, that is 70% of the universe is made of dark energy, as mysterious and unknown as dark matter. After half a century of research in high energy physics, we are still left with major unanswered questions such as where does the mass come from and what is this dark matter. This is why I have recently taken an interest to Hidden Valley models and Invisible Higgs decays. With the Large Hadron Collider about to turn on at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, along with nearly 3000 other scientists working on the ATLAS experiment, my goal is to see if you could get some clues about what matter is really made of.

Selected Publications

• Mentor and Pioneer: A tribute to Engin Arik and her support for Women in Physics. (http://pauline.web.cern.ch/pauline/presentations/PioneerAndMentor-writeup.pdf)To appear in the Balkans Physics Letters, February 2009.
• Sensitivity to an Invisibly decaying Higgs boson with ATLAS data,
  (http://pauline.web.cern.ch/pauline/presentations/InvisibleHiggs-CSCnote.pdf)
  P. Gagnon et. al, published in Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment - Detector, Trigger and Physics, the ATLAS Collaboration, arXiv:0901.0512 http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0512
• Invisible Higgs boson decays in the ZH and WH channels, (http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/681580?ln=en)
  P. Gagnon, June 2005, ATL-PHYS-PUB-2005-011.
• Search for a low mass CP-odd Higgs boson in e+e- collisions with the OPAL detector at LEP2, (http://opal.web.cern.ch/Opal/pubs/paper/html/pr365.html)
  OPAL Collaboration, G. Abbiendi \etal, CERN-EP-2002-058, submitted to Eur. Phys. J. C.
  P. Gagnon, June 2005, ATL-PHYS-PUB-2005-011.