Prize Recipient

Maria Florencia Canelli
University of Rochester

Citation:

"For developing a new technique for extracting the maximum information in top decay events in order to measure the W boson helicity."

Background:

Florencia Canelli graduated in 1995 with a 'Licenciado en Ciencias Fisicas' from the Universidad Nacional de Asuncion, Paraguay. In 1997 she started her graduate career at the University of Rochester, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2003 on research performed at the DZero experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) under the supervision of Prof. Tom Ferbel. Since 2003, she has held a postdoctoral appointment with UCLA at the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

Canelli's dissertation involved a novel technique to gain information about the properties of the top quark. The method, which she developed in collaboration with her Fermilab colleagues Juan Estrada and Gaston Gutierrez, is based on a direct comparison of all measured variables in antitop-top events produced at the Fermilab Tevatron with a leading matrix-element that describes the entire production and decay process. In her dissertation, entitled 'Helicity of the W Boson in Single-Lepton ttbar Events', she examined the decays of W bosons in such events, in order to establish how the spin of the W boson in top-quark decays correlates with its momentum vector.

Canelli was awarded the URA thesis award for the best dissertation at Fermilab during 2002-2003 and the Frederick Lobkowicz thesis award from the University of Rochester in 2003.

She is eager to apply her method to the upcoming investigations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Selection Committee:

Richard Partridge (Chair), John Hobbs (Vice-Chair), Ken Heller, Usha Mallik, Vivek Sharma