Dr A Shaikhiev

Summary

Artur has participated in three projects: NA62 (CERN, Switzerland), T2K (J-PARC, Japan) and BNL-E949 (USA).

He obtained his Masters degree at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2008. His thesis was devoted to a feasibility study of a heavy neutrino production search in kaon decays using BNL- E949 data. He also worked on R&D and construction of the Side Muon Range Detector (SMRD) for the T2K experiment: studied the physical properties of the prototype (light yield, space/time resolution) and was responsible for the quality of the produced SMRD counters. The detector is designed to improve the neutrino energy spectrum measurement, to identify background and to calibrate the other detectors. Artur received an Institute for Nuclear Research Young Scientist Award (2010) for this work. His PhD degree was obtained at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INR Moscow, Russia) in 2015. The PhD thesis is focused on the search for heavy neutrino production in the K+ -> mu+ N decay using BNL- E949 experimental data (USA). The resulting world-best upper limit is very useful for theoreticians to constrain parameters in extensions of the Standard Model (SM). The result was published in Phys.Rev.D 91 (2015) 5, 052001 before his thesis submission and presented at several international conferences.

The study performed for Artur's PhD degree was extended to search for the multibody decay K+ -> mu+ X, where X is a set of invisible neutral particles (2 and more). This study motivated an update of the branching ratio calculation for the K+ → l+ nu nu nu, (l = e, mu) decay within the SM framework in collaboration with the INR theoretical department. The final experimental result is presented in such a way as to allow calculation of rates for any assumed muon spectrum. This feature is useful for New Physics models.

At the end of 2015 Artur initiated a search for heavy neutrino decays within the T2K experiment. The result was published in Phys.Rev.D100 (2019) 5, 052006. In September 2015 he joined the NA62 collaboration and became one of the key experts of the NA62MC software package used for simulation. He also performed a feasibility study to search for the very rare SM decay K+ -> l+ nu nu nu (l = e, mu). It was shown that NA62 has the potential to improve on the current limit in the positron mode by an order of magnitude.

In 2018 Artur moved to a post-doctoral position at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). The method to search for the very rare SM decay K+ -> e+ nu nu nu was developed in detail. Artur also proposed and developed a test-bench system to generate special Monte Carlo samples using the UCL (Belgium) computing cluster, and he is currently responsible for the operation of the system. This facility has proved to be instrumental for the development of the NA62 simulation and reconstruction software.

Artur was awarded the Albert Tavkhelidze prize by the Institute for Nuclear Research (2018), and a prestigious Moscow Government Young Scientist Prize (2019) for his research into heavy neutral lepton production and decays in kaon and neutrino experiments. He also served as a member of the Local Organizing Committee for the International Conference on New Photo-detectors (PD15), obtaining experience in workshop organization.

As a Marie Curie fellow in Birmingham, Artur plans to perform a K+ -> pi+ gamma gamma measurement to a record 3% precision, providing an important test of low-energy QCD.