Experimental Particle Physics Rolling Grant 2009-2014

A proton beam will smash into another proton beam at CERN with more energy than any collider has ever achieved, and Manchester’s particle physicists are building the detectors to catch what flies out. The group runs four major experiments that collectively tackle two of the biggest open questions in fundamental science: what new particles exist at energies we have never probed before, and whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle. ATLAS and LHCb will sift through the debris of proton collisions to find particles predicted by theory—or ones no one has predicted. SuperNemo searches for a rare nuclear decay that, if seen, would rewrite the Standard Model of particle physics. Dzero continues to mine data from Fermilab until the LHC overtakes it. This is curiosity-driven research with no immediate practical application. But the pattern is familiar: the World Wide Web was invented at CERN to handle particle physics data, and the accelerator technologies developed here later found uses in medical imaging and cancer therapy. If the group finds new particles or confirms that neutrinos break existing rules, the discovery will reshape our understanding of matter itself. If they find nothing unexpected, that too is a result—it tells theorists where not to look.