Tova Holmes

Assistant Professor

Experimental High Energy Particle Physics
Office: 504 Nielsen Physics Building
Phone: 865-974-7820
tholmes@utk.edu | Personal Website

Brief Vita

• University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Assistant Professor (2020-)
• Enrico Fermi Institute, U. of Chicago, Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-2020)


• PhD Physics, University of California, Berkeley (2016)
• MA Physics, University of California, Berkeley (2013)
• BA Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics, Harvard University (2011)

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Selected Honors

• UT Society of Physics Students Research Advisor of the Year (2023)
• DOE Early Career Research Award (2022-2027)
• Robert R. McCormick Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, University of Chicago (2017-2019)
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2011-2016)
• Harvard College Research Fellowship (2009-2010)

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Research Areas

I’m an experimental particle physicist searching for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model. My work is centered at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, where I worked first with the ATLAS Experiment, and now with the CMS Experiment. I work collaboratively with thousands of physicists around the globe to build and operate massive particle detectors, and lead smaller teams to use their data to search for new particles.

My expertise is in searching for Supersymmetry, and in particular, scenarios in which particles acquire macroscopic lifetimes, producing exotic signatures which would evade standard search methods. I also work in hardware-based pattern recognition, focusing on tracking particles at high enough rates to use this information in real time analysis.

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Selected Publications

1. ATLAS Collaboration. Search for displaced leptons in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Physical Review Letters (2021)
2. ATLAS Collaboration. The ATLAS Fast TracKer System, Journal of Instrumentation (2021)
3. S. Sottocornola et. al. Cooling and timing tests of the ATLAS Fast TracKer VME boards, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science (2021)
4. J. Alimena et. al. Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider, Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics (2020)
5. ATLAS Collaboration. Search for new phenomena using the invariant mass distribution of same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pairs in events with missing transverse momentum in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Eur. Phys. J. C (2018)
6. ATLAS Collaboration. Performance of the ATLAS track reconstruction algorithms in dense environments in LHC Run 2, Eur. Phys. J. C (2017)
7. ATLAS Collaboration. Search for new phenomena in events containing a same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pair, jets, and large missing transverse momentum in √s= 13 pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Eur. Phys. J. C (2017)
8. The ATLAS Collaboration. Search for new phenomena using the invariant mass distribution of same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pairs in events with missing transverse momentum in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Eur. Phys. J. C 78 no. 8, 625 (2018)
9. The ATLAS Collaboration. Performance of the ATLAS track reconstruction algorithms in dense environments in LHC Run 2, Eur. Phys. J. C 77, 673 (2017)
10. The ATLAS Collaboration. Search for new phenomena in events containing a same-flavour opposite-sign dilepton pair, jets, and large missing transverse momentum in √s = 13 pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Eur. Phys. J. C 77 no. 3, 144 (2017)