My Ph.D work is divided between large past and present experiments at CERN. On the analysis side, I am looking at data collected by the OPAL detector, at energies of 183GeV and above, with the objective of placing limits on the so called anomalous quartic coupling of the electroweak gauge bosons. Specifically, I am looking at events with two final state photons and missing energy, the cross sections for which may have contributions from processes with WW-gamma-gamma or ZZ-gamma-gamma vertices. I am also involved with the barrel "system test" for the ATLAS semi-conductor-tracker (SCT). The goal of the system test is to operate as many of the silicon strip detector modules as possible in a configuration as close as possible to that of the planned SCT in terms of mechanical mounting,cooling, supply and shielding, thereby assuring full functionality of the design. I am particularly focussed on the issues of commom mode noise and cross talk within and between detector modules.

I am part of the OPAL collaboration, one of the four LEP detectors at CERN. I have performed analysis of the data collected by OPAL at the highest energies (LEP2 data) to search for heavy stable charged particles. Such particles are predicted by various scenarios, for example Supersimmetry, and provide a very characteristic signature in the detector, particularly for dE/dx energy loss. A paper is being published with competitive limits on chargino and smuons masses. For my Ph.D. thesis I am using OPAL LEP2 data to set a limit on the mass of the lightest supersymmetric particle in the MSSM combining different analyses and using Higgs Search constraints. For hardware I am engaged in the realization of CMS (an LHC experiment) Encaps Muon Chambers slow controls.

The NA50/CERN experiment studies the production of muon pairs in collisions of high intensity relativistic proton or ion beams with several fixed targets. This experiment has reported for the first time the anomolous suppression in the production of the J/psi ressonance in Pb-Pb collisions, which is in agreement with a phase transition of normal hadronic matter to a quark gluon plasma (QGP). Data coming from previous experiments (NA38 and NA51) have showen that the J/psi suppression present in data from p-p to S-U can be interpreted in terms of normal hadronic processes. These mechanisms, extrapolated to Pb-Pb collisions are unable to explain the observed amount of suppression. My current work is devoted to the high accurate study of J/psi absorption in proton-nucleous collisions which allows to establish the good absorption reference in order to quantify the extra suppresion seen in central Pb-Pb collisions.