Professor of Physics

Earlham College: B.A., Physics

University of Notre Dame: Ph.D., High Energy Physics

University of Michigan: Research Fellow, High Energy Astrophysics

Contact Information

Department of Physics

Rm. 113 Fondren Science Bldg.

Southern Methodist University

phone: (214) 768-1793

email: kehoe@physics.smu.edu

Research Interests

My interests focus primarily on the phenomena that occur at the smallest distance scales and at the earliest times in the universe. Most of my experience has been in studying the process by which nature's most fundamental particles obtain mass. To do this, I study the most massive particles in nature: the top quark and the Higgs boson. The last few years have been very exciting for this kind of research, and I expect the next many years to be fascinating at the Large Hadron Collider where my research now focuses. Another way to look at the fundamental processes in nature is to look at the very large scale in cosmology. My students currently work on studying various types of stellar systems which are useful to understand the universe at early times. The search to understand the true nature of 'dark energy' is a focus of this work.

My astrophysics research comes primarily via work in the ROTSE project in the search for and study of optical counterparts for gamma-ray bursts via the use of fast slewing, wide-field, small aperture robotic telescopes. I was involved in the discovery of the first prompt counterpart discovered, GRB 990123, and other searches and analyses of GRBs since. To date, though, the bulk of my work has come in particle physics, having worked on both the top quark discovery and analysis (D0 experiment), and the Higgs boson discovery and subsequent analysis (ATLAS). My particle physics research has included substantial efforts on calibration, data reduction, and, in the case of the top quark mass measurement which were world leading in their channel for several years, precision measurement. More recently, I have resumed involvement in ROTSE to study nearby supernovae with an eye toward cosmological measurements down the road. This has ultimately led to a program in fast data reduction and BAO cosmology on DESI.