Research

Burzynski Lab

Our group studies the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that govern their interactions, using data from the ATLAS Experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A central focus is the search for a new “dark sector” of particles — hypothetical particles that interact only very weakly with ordinary matter, yet could make up a large fraction of the matter in the Universe.

To pursue these searches, our group develops advanced machine learning techniques and the algorithms that reconstruct charged particle trajectories, work that is especially important for the High-Luminosity upgrade of the LHC. Looking ahead, our group is contributing to detector design and reconstruction for a 10 TeV muon collider — a proposed next-generation machine that would push the energy frontier far beyond the reach of the LHC.

Group members

Principal Investigator

Jackson Burzynski

Postdoctoral fellows

Timothy Mathew

Graduate students

I am recruiting!

Undergraduate students

I am recruiting!

Our group meets on Fridays at 4pm in Nielsen Hall 365 — see the group meetings page for the schedule and materials.

Current Projects

Searches for unconventional signatures

Many extensions of the Standard Model predict particles that leave unusual signatures in the detector: long-lived particles (LLPs) that decay far from the collision point, or dark-sector showers that produce jets of displaced tracks. Standard reconstruction and analysis techniques are not designed for these signals, leaving them largely unexplored.

Our group coordinates a wide-ranging search program targeting displaced decays from the Higgs boson, dark photons, and exotic particles connected to dark matter. We also developed the first emerging jet tagger in ATLAS, which powered the first Run 3 search for dark QCD.

Physics briefing: Higgs to long-lived particles →
Physics briefing: Emerging Jets →

Charged particle track reconstruction

Charged particle tracks are the foundation of nearly every measurement at the LHC — and the most computationally demanding part of event reconstruction. Our work focuses on tracks that standard algorithms are not designed for, especially those with large impact parameters produced in the decays of long-lived particles.

We led improvements to large-radius tracking in the ATLAS Inner Detector, and we are now developing large impact parameter track reconstruction in the ACTS toolkit to meet the dense environments and high pile-up of the High-Luminosity LHC.

Machine learning

Machine learning runs through all of our research. We develop algorithms for identifying unconventional physics signatures, for charged particle track reconstruction, and for the reinterpretation of existing searches in new theoretical contexts.

This includes transformer-based taggers for dark-sector jets and graph neural networks that reconstruct displaced tracks with high efficiency and precision.

Future colliders

A muon collider could reach 10 TeV collision energies in a compact ring, opening a direct window on physics far beyond the LHC. Its central experimental challenge is the beam-induced background (BIB): decay products of the circulating muons that flood the detector at every bunch crossing.

Our group is developing reconstruction algorithms to deal with the BIB and helping to design detectors for a future 10 TeV muon collider.

Getting started

New to the group? The getting started guide walks through setting up an OSCER account, using our ouhep partition, requesting a node on Sooner, setting up Athena, and where to keep your data on OURDisk.

Recent talks

Jul 2026 Track and Vertex Reconstruction for the ATLAS Inner Detector, ICHEP 2026, Natal, Brazil
May 2026 Recent searches for Beyond Standard Model Phenomena with the ATLAS Experiment, Fermilab Wine and Cheese Seminar, Batavia, USA
Apr 2026 Large Impact Parameter Track Reconstruction in ATLAS Using ACTS, ACTS Workshop, Nikhef, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Apr 2026 Shining a light on the Dark Sector: Probing Dark QCD Signatures with the ATLAS Experiment, HEP seminar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Mar 2026 Shining a light on the Dark Sector: Probing Dark QCD Signatures with the ATLAS Experiment, HEP seminar, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
May 2025 How to think about detector design at a future pp collider, LHCP 2025, Taipei, Taiwan
Jan 2025 Exotic searches at ATLAS, 9th International Conference on High Energy Particle and Nuclear Physics in the LHC Era, Valparaíso, Chile
Oct 2024 Searches for Long-lived Particles at the LHC, Dark Interactions 2024, Vancouver, Canada
Sep 2024 Probing the Lifetime Frontier at the LHC and Beyond, Physics Potential of Future Colliders, Vancouver, Canada

Selected publications

ATLAS Collaboration, Track and Vertex Reconstruction with the ATLAS Inner Detector, submitted to JINST, arXiv:2605.07585 [hep-ex]
ATLAS Collaboration, Search for emerging jets in pp collisions at √s = 13.6 TeV with the ATLAS experiment, Rept. Prog. Phys. 88 (2025) 097801, arXiv:2505.02429 [hep-ex]
ATLAS Collaboration, Search for light long-lived particles in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV using displaced vertices in the ATLAS inner detector, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133 (2024) 161803, arXiv:2403.15332 [hep-ex]
ATLAS Collaboration, Performance of the reconstruction of large impact parameter tracks in the inner detector of ATLAS, Eur. Phys. J. C 83 (2023) 1081, arXiv:2304.12867 [hep-ex]
ATLAS Collaboration, Search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson into long-lived particles in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV using displaced vertices in the ATLAS inner detector, JHEP 11 (2021) 229, arXiv:2107.06092 [hep-ex]
ATLAS Collaboration, Search for long-lived neutral particles produced in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV decaying into displaced hadronic jets in the ATLAS inner detector and muon spectrometer, Phys. Rev. D 101 (2020) 052013, arXiv:1911.12575 [hep-ex]

Join us

Interested in working with us? I welcome both undergraduate and graduate students who are excited to explore new frontiers in particle physics. If you're interested in joining the group, please get in touch!

Email me