Graduate student Emily Thompson and Professor Stéphane Willocq performed the first search for contact interactions at the LHC in the dimuon channel using data collected with the ATLAS detector during the 2010 pp collision run. The results of this search have been published in the July 1st edition of Physical Review D Rapid Communications: Phys. Rev. D 84, 011101 (2011), arXiv:1104.4398 [hep-ex]. The limits placed on the compositeness scale Lambda are the most stringent to date.
Emily Thompson earned her PhD in June 2011 and is currently working as a postdoctoral research associate for Columbia University. She continues to work on ATLAS at CERN, focusing on boosted top quarks.