Rate My Professor Salvatore Rappoccio

Salvatore Rappoccio is a Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University at Buffalo, a position he has held since advancing through the ranks following his arrival in 2012. Prior to this, he conducted postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University from 2007 to 2012. Rappoccio earned his BS in Physics from Boston University in 2000 and his PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 2005. His research specializes in high-energy particle physics as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He focuses on searches for solutions to the hierarchy problem, the discrepancy between the Higgs boson mass scale of approximately 100 GeV and the Planck scale of about 10^18 GeV. This involves analyzing proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV to study particles such as the Higgs boson, top quark, W and Z bosons, with emphasis on models producing particles with large Lorentz boosts and massive hadronically decaying particles known as boosted jets. Additional interests include details of the strong nuclear force via quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in jets, top quark production, jet substructure, searches for new physics, and silicon pixel tracking detectors.

Rappoccio has earned recognition including the CMS LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher Award in 2015 and, as a member of the CMS Collaboration, the 2013 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize from the European Physical Society for the discovery of a Higgs boson. In 2020, he received the President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring at the University at Buffalo. He has secured major funding such as a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Key publications encompass 'Measurement of the differential ttbar production cross section for high-pt top quarks in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV' (Physical Review D 94, 072002, 2016), 'Search for resonant ttbar production in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV' (Physical Review D 93, 012001, 2016), 'Search for massive resonances in dijet systems containing jets tagged as W or Z boson decays in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=8 TeV' (Journal of High Energy Physics 1408, 173, 2014), and recent contributions like 'Simultaneous Probe of the Charm and Bottom Quark Yukawa Couplings Using ttH Events' (Physical Review Letters 136, 011801, 2026). His work has included roles on the Higgs Publication Committee.