Miles Cochran-Branson
Third-year Physics Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington
Hi! I'm Miles, a PhD candidate studying experimental, high energy, particle, physics. I'm interested in all things physics, in particular computational and mathematical physics and machine learning applications to fundamental experiment. Primarily, I am an experimentalist but am always looking to expand my horizons.
Currently, I am affiliated with the ATLAS collaboration at CERN through the University of Washington. The analysis I work on is focused on tau leptons; in particular, I am part of the team measuring the $H \to \tau\tau$ cross-section in the boosted regime and in measuring spin correlations in the $Z \to \tau\tau$ decay channel. Previously, I worked on the legacy Run 2 $H \rightarrow \tau\tau$ cross-section measurement and on algorithm development for $\tau$ energy scale calibration at the ATLAS experiment using a novel Mixture-Density-Network approach.
I am currently funded by the WATCHEP fellowship which provides two years of funding for research in computation related to high-energy particle physics. For this fellowship, I am working on various implementations of particle tracking as-a-service. This includes GPU acceleration as-a-service with an implementation of the existing tracking library traccc and GNN as-a-service for the GNN4ITk project.
Research Interests
Select Publications
- Differential cross-section measurements of Higgs boson production in the $H \to \tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ decay channel in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV with the ATLAS detectorJournal of High Energy Physics 2025(10), 010 (2025).
- Track reconstruction as a service for collider physicsJINST 20(P06002) (2025).