Name: Dr. Hale Sert
Status: Post-Doc
Institut: 3. Physikalisches Institut B, RWTH Aachen

• Currently I am working on… the physics of tau leptons, which are the heaviest leptons that decay into leptons and hadrons, at the CMS experiment. As being tau lepton high-level trigger subgroup convener, I am specifically focused on hadronically decaying tau lepton triggers.
• This is important because… hadronically decaying tau leptons play a crucial role in many analyses, like those that investigate the coupling of the Higgs boson to fermions. Triggering is important for experiments like CMS that produce huge amounts of data which cannot all be stored. Therefore, triggers are used to select events of potential physics interest to be stored.
• A typical working day means… following the status, progress and news about the ongoing experiment and new developments by attending meetings and collaborating with colleagues, supervising the studies ongoing under my responsibility, as well as working on my own project in the remaining time.
• I work together with… both the tau lepton object group and the trigger group, due to my duty as tau trigger convener. I am collaborating with several people working on tasks for the validation and developments of the tau lepton high level triggers, as well as with people in our group in the institute, who are working on various topics.
• The best thing about my job is… the satisfaction of actively contributing to the operation of the CMS experiment and to the studies related to the tau lepton physics, which helps in understanding the observed Higgs boson and the standard model of particle physics via its leptonic couplings.
• The downside of my job is… that there is no official working time. One may need to work frequently outside of the working days and hours which impacts one’s social life.
• Being a member of the CMS Collaboration means for me… being a part of the team of people who devote themselves to further improve the understanding of particle physics.
• My professional plans are... to keep contributing to the studies in the CMS experiment to help discovering unknown pieces of particle physics.
• Without the LHC we would not have known... the existence of the Higgs boson, and so the fundament of the standard model of particle physics.