Experimental Particle Physics

Since October 2025, Cristina Botta is an Adjunct Professor at our Institute. 

 

Cristina is an experimental particle physicist, member of the CMS experiment collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2008. 

 

She received her PhD in Physics in 2011 from the University of Torino, Italy. After her experience as Research Fellow and Staff at the CERN Experimental Physics Department (2012-2019), she was awarded an SNF PRIMA grant to create a research team within our CMS experiment group.  After four years as an Assistant Professor at the UZH Physics Department (2019-2023) she is now a Research Physicist at the CERN Experimental Physics Department.

 

For many years, Cristina’s research activity focused on the development of data analysis strategies to discover the Higgs boson and then measure its properties. In 2018, she received the CMS Young Researcher Prize for ‘her crucial and sustained contributions to the search for, and subsequently the measurement of, the Higgs boson via its decay into two Z bosons, and in the observation of the Higgs boson in association with top quarks’. 

 

In 2015, when the LHC started to provide higher energy collisions to the experiments, Cristina’s research interest shifted towards direct searches for Dark Matter, and she coordinated the CMS analysis group working on Supersymmetry (SUSY) searches in leptonic final states. Together with her SNF group, she started a program towards searches for Dark Matter in Compressed Mass Spectra, an experimentally challenging region of the parameter space where SUSY can still be light. She is currently leading at CERN a larger analysis team that is expanding the original program towards searches for long lived and soft light leptons.

 

With the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC project (2025-2035), in 2017 she has joined the effort towards the upgrade of the CMS L1 Trigger. The L1 Trigger logic and architecture, instrumented by custom hardware processor boards, needs to be completely redesigned to face the high luminosity challenge. Cristina led the L1 Trigger Detector Performance Group for the 2020-2022 term, group which is in charge of developing new trigger algorithms and studying their performance in order to take final decisions on the design and implementation of the new trigger system. In January 2021 she received an award by the CMS collaboration in recognition of her achievements in this research area. Cristina was then appointed Deputy Project Manager for L1 Trigger project for the 2022-2024 term. The Project Manager and their two deputies are responsible of all aspects of the L1 Trigger project, from the system active in the LHC data-taking to the detector upgrade progress for HL-LHC. The L1 Trigger project features ~300 members from ~50 different institutes around the world. 

 

Since 2024, Cristina is co-coordinating the Next Generation Trigger Project (NGT) in CMS. NGT is a five year R&D project (2024-2028) supported by an external donation, combining the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, the CERN’s Theory and IT department, the CERN’s Experimental Physics Software. The project aims to leverage innovative computing technologies for data acquisition and processing and see how the experiment's trigger algorithms and selections can be re-designed to expand the trigger acceptance. In the lack of hints of Physics Beyond the Standard Model in all the searches conducted so far, the goal is to open the possibility to verify if New Physics is buried under the bulk of events that we are currently throwing away.  Cristina is in particular coordinating the implementation of the NGT project for the HL-LHC L1 Trigger which is organized in three different Tasks: L1 Scouting for HL-LHC, Practical real-time AI for Level 1 Trigger and L1 Scouting, L1 scouting data compression and anomaly detection

 

In addition to these coordination roles, in 2026 Cristina is directly involved and supervising young postdocs and Ph.D. students in the following open projects: 

 

- Data analysis with Run-2 & Run-3 LHC data 

1) Searches for New Physics in final states with soft prompt and displaced light leptons and missing transverse energy (Compressed EWK SUSY)

2) Searches for New Physics in final states with multiple soft jets (Disorder Models)

3) Searches for low mass resonaces decaying into electrons (with CMS Run-3 Parking Triggers) 

4) Searches for New Physics in the rare decay of Bs into tau leptons, exploiting ttbar events and particle-transformer based jet tagging. 

 

- Phase-2 L1 Trigger Algorithm/Menu Developments

1) Electrons and Photons identification in the Correlator L1T (Some results here)

2) ML-based Pile-up per Particle Identification in the Correlator L1T 

3) L1 Menu design for HL-LHC data taking

 

- Phase-2 L1 Scouting 

1) Prospects for searching for low mass resonances decaying into two-muons  with L1 Trigger objects at the 40MHz L1 Scouting for HL-LHC (Some results here and here) 

2) Prospects for searching for low mass resonances decaying into two electrons with L1 Trigger objects at the 40MHz L1 Scouting for HL-LHC (Some results here and here) 

3) Prospects for searching for low mass resonances decaying into two taus with L1 Trigger objects at the 40MHz L1 Scouting for HL-LHC 

4) General HL-LHC Physics Prospects paper with the 40MHz L1 Scouting for HL-LHC