Physicists at Lancaster University will smash protons together at the LHC and fire neutrinos across Japan to probe the Universe’s first moments after the Big Bang. This research tackles a fundamental gap in knowledge: we do not know why matter exists at all. The Universe should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated each other completely. Yet matter survived. By studying CP violation—a subtle difference in how particles and antiparticles behave—and by searching for the Higgs boson, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions, the team hopes to explain this imbalance and the origin of mass. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But similar curiosity-driven work on particle physics led to the World Wide Web, medical imaging technologies, and the grid computing systems that now underpin global data sharing. If the team observes electron neutrinos appearing in a muon neutrino beam, it could open a new window on CP violation in the neutrino sector, reshaping our understanding of why the Universe is made of matter rather than nothing.
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This research is aimed at understanding the properties of the basic building blocks of the Universe (the elementary particles) and the nature of the fundamental forces which govern the interactions of these particles. In so doing, deep insights will be gained about the origin and evolution of the Universe, especially in the first moments after the Big Bang. The Lancaster research programme covers all the main types of accelerator facilities and is based on hadron collider physics with the Tevatron (Fermilab) and LHC (CERN) machines, and the observation of long baseline neutrino oscillations in Japan. All of this work will be underpinned by Lancaster's expertise in characterising and understanding the properties of heavily irradiated silicon particle detectors, in operating high performance computing facilities on the Grid and in writing offline event reconstruction software. The hadron collider physics is expected to reveal detailed properties of B hadrons (containing heavy b-quarks) including the mixing of neutral B mesons containing strange quarks, and CP violation which is related to the existence of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. Searches for new physics at the LHC will focus on understanding the origin of mass (and the role of the Higgs boson), the existence of new symmetries of nature (e.g. supersymmetry) and extra spatial dimensions. The neutrino oscillations programme is expected to provide important information about the masses of and the amount of mixing amongst the three known species of neutrinos. If the appearance of electron neutrinos can be observed in a muon neutrino beam then it may be possible, in a further phase of the research, to establish the existence of CP violation in the neutrino sector of the Standard Model. This could have wide reaching implications for the understanding of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. The development of new particle accelerator technology for high energy particle physics and a broad range of alternaive applications is the mission of the Cockcroft Institute. The Lancaster group were co-founders of the Institute and remain commited to supporting its evolution.
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