RHUL Particle Physics Rolling Grant

Physicists are wiring up the electronics and software for a particle detector that will hunt for a missing particle—the Higgs boson—when the Large Hadron Collider switches on in 2009. The team at Royal Holloway, University of London has already built and commissioned the electronic systems and the code that drives them. Once the collider starts smashing protons together at unprecedented energies, they will sift through the resulting debris for signs of the Higgs, supersymmetric particles, and other exotic phenomena predicted by theory but never observed. They will also study the top quark and the internal structure of the proton in finer detail than before. This is fundamental science. It addresses a gap at the heart of the Standard Model of particle physics: the Higgs boson is the mechanism that gives other particles mass, and without experimental confirmation the model remains incomplete. If the Higgs is found, it will confirm decades of theoretical work and open the door to understanding why the Universe has the structure it does. If supersymmetric particles appear, they could explain the dark matter that makes up most of the cosmos. There is no immediate practical application—no new battery or medical scanner will emerge next year. But past fundamental particle physics gave us the World Wide Web, medical imaging techniques, and the accelerator technology now used in cancer therapy. A deeper understanding of matter at its most basic level has a long history of quietly reshaping what becomes possible.