The Manchester particle physics group will smash protons together at the world’s most powerful colliders and hunt for dark matter particles deep underground, using the largest datasets ever collected to probe the universe’s most stubborn mysteries. These experiments address three fundamental gaps in our understanding of reality: what dark matter is made of, why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter, and how particles acquire mass. Current theory—the Standard Model—cannot explain any of these phenomena. The group will search for new particles and forces that could fill these gaps, using detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Fermilab in the US, and underground laboratories in Italy. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But the same kind of curiosity-driven research that once revealed the Higgs boson also gave us the World Wide Web, medical imaging technologies, and the particle accelerators now used to treat cancer. If these experiments succeed, they will rewrite the textbooks on how the universe works at its most basic level—and history shows that such knowledge often leads to technologies nobody could have predicted.
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The Manchester Particle Physics group carries out experimental research into the fundamental particles that exist in nature. We seek to address the current open questions in particle physics, such as “What is the nature of Dark Matter”, “Why is there a matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe”, and “What is the origin of particle mass”. We carry out our research at a number of international experiments at the Energy Frontier (ATLAS, FCC, FASER), in Flavour Physics (LHCb, BES-III, g-2, Mu2e), in Neutrino Physics (DUNE, MicroBooNE, SBND, SuperNemo, NEXT), and in direct Dark Matter detection (DarkSide-50, DarkSide-20k). We are fully involved in the leadership of the experiments, from the initial design and construction, through the operation of the detector and the data acquisition, to the physics exploitation. We also play a leading role in the proposed upgrades to each of the experiments, aiming to make them more precise and more sensitive to the underlying physics. We have designed a broad programme of research for the period 2025-2029. At the ATLAS and LHCb experiments, we will combine the largest-ever hadron-collider datasets with novel analysis techniques to search for dark matter and new sources of CP violation (to address the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem). We will also carry out new precision measurements of the Higgs boson’s interactions. At Fermilab, we will perform new measurements at the Mu2e and SBN experiments that will provide dramatic improvements in sensitivity to charged-lepton-flavour violating interactions and sterile neutrinos, both of which are hypothetical extensions to the Standard Model of Particle Physics. We will lead new analyses at the Darkside-20k experiment that are uniquely sensitive to low-mass dark matter particles. We combine our physics analysis programme with a vibrant research, development and construction programme that aims to (i) develop new detector technologies and data acquisition systems and (ii) apply these solutions in the future particle physics experiments. These advances will allow us to take a leading role in future collider experiments (HL-LHC, FCC) and underpin the next generation of neutrino and dark matter experiments (DUNE, SOLAIRE).
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