Physicists are smashing protons together at the Large Hadron Collider to probe the smallest building blocks of matter—quarks and leptons—and the forces that bind them. This work addresses the most fundamental gaps in our understanding of the universe: what gives particles mass (the Higgs boson, discovered with the team’s help), what dark matter is made of, and how elusive particles called neutrinos behave. Although dark matter’s gravitational pull is well documented, no one has ever directly detected a dark matter particle in a laboratory. The researchers are tackling this by building and running detectors that look for dark matter scattering off atomic nuclei—using liquid argon in the DEAP/CLEAN experiment, high-pressure gas chambers in DMTPC, and the upcoming Lux-Zeplin experiment. They are also applying their detector expertise to neutrino studies for the Hyper-K experiment. This is fundamental science, not applied research with an immediate practical payoff. But the same kind of curiosity-driven work that uncovered the Higgs boson also gave us the World Wide Web and medical imaging technologies. If these experiments succeed in directly detecting dark matter or revealing new particles, they would rewrite our understanding of the cosmos. Even the detector technologies developed along the way—such as high-pressure time projection chambers—could find uses in security scanning or medical diagnostics.
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Experimental particle physics addresses some of the fundamental questions about the structure and behaviour of the Universe at the level of the smallest particles of matter, the quarks and the leptons, and the forces acting between them. We are exploring fundamental properties of particles at the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and also exploring the nature of dark matter and neutrinos by developing and employing novel detection systems. We are contributing to the continued operation of the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We have constructed and commissioned electronic systems and the software that drives them. From the beginning of data taking we have played a leading role in searches for exotic particles, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, and studies of properties of the top quark. We are preparing for the renewed data taking starting in 2015 with further analyses on these and related topics. Although there is ample indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter is inferred from its gravitational interactions, it has not yet been directly detected in terrestrial laboratories. Direct detection experiments seek to observe dark matter scattering on target detector nuclei. We explore these issues through a world-leading dark matter search on DEAP/CLEAN, a liquid Argon detector with unique potential for scaling to multi-tonne masses, with the DMTPC detector development programme to measure the dark matter wind, and the Lux-Zeplin experiment. The group's expertise in high pressure TPCs is now being utilised to carry out measurements relevant to the study of neutrinos as part of the Hyper-K experiment. Our expertise in accelerator science will allow us to carry out studies for the machine-detector interface for the High Luminosity LHC and ILC. We will also expand the interactions between our phenomenology group and the experimental community.
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