Experimental Particle Physics Rolling Grant 2009-2014

A proton beam will slam into another proton beam at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and Manchester physicists will sift through the debris for particles never seen before. This work addresses a fundamental gap in knowledge: the Standard Model of particle physics cannot explain dark matter, why matter dominates over antimatter, or why particles have mass. The Manchester group runs four experiments that each attack a different piece of this puzzle. ATLAS will hunt for new particles at the highest collision energies ever achieved. LHCb will study the subtle differences between matter and antimatter in particles called B hadrons. DZero, at Fermilab, continues to probe the top quark until the LHC takes over. SuperNemo searches for a rare nuclear decay that, if found, would prove the neutrino is its own antiparticle—a discovery that would rewrite the rules of particle physics. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But the same kind of curiosity-driven research that once uncovered the Higgs boson also gave us the World Wide Web, medical imaging (PET scanners), and the accelerator technology now used to treat cancer with proton beams. The detectors, electronics, and computing systems developed for these experiments often find their way into medical diagnostics, industrial imaging, and data infrastructure.