Maxwell B Chertok

Research Interests:

Professor Maxwell Chertok joined the UC Davis faculty in 2000, and performs research in high energy particle physics.  His major focus is the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, where, following a decades-long intensive search to uncover the mechanism responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, the discovery of a Higgs boson was announced in 2012 by the CMS and ATLAS experiments. This constitutes a major advancement for the field, but simultaneously raises further profound questions about the nature of the universe.

At UC Davis, Chertok has worked on three critical detector subsystems. The silicon vertex detector for the CDF Run II experiment required advances in semiconductor technology, control systems, and data buffering. Chertok and collaborators designed a novel parallel fiber optic data readout scheme to meet these needs. At CERN, the UC Davis group contributed to the design, assembly, and testing of the silicon pixel detector, still going strong at Run 3 of the LHC.  More recently, Chertok and his team of students and postdocs have contributed to the new Outer Tracker slated for High Luminosity LHC.  This detector will feature both silicon pixel and strip detectors on each module and enable track triggering at Level 1 for the first time at CMS.

Data analysis is a key area of exploration.  Using advanced AI/ML techniques, Chertok uses jet and leptonic signatures, including overlapping hadronic tau decays, to search for new phenomena.  LHC Run 3 is providing enormous high-quality datasets with which to probe nature at the smallest scale, and to address questions such as how particles acquire mass, why there is an electroweak scale, and what is the nature of dark matter.

Research Areas

• High Energy Experiment

Career History

• Ph.D., Boston University, 1997
• Assistant Research Scientist, Texas A&M University, 1996-2000
• Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis, 2000-2004
• Associate Professor, University of California, Davis, 2004-2009
• Professor, UC Davis, 2009-Present
• Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Bristol, UK, 2023

Honors

• Phi Eta Sigma, Duke University
• 2013 EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, for an outstanding contribution to High Energy Physics, awarded to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, "for the discovery of a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism".
• 2019 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the EPS for an outstanding contribution to High Energy Physics, awarded to the CDF and D0 Collaborations, for the discovery of the top quark and the detailed measurement of its properties.
• 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded to the CMS Collaboration