A team at Queen Mary University of London is helping to run the ATLAS particle detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which has just begun recording its first collisions. This research addresses a fundamental gap in physics: the Standard Model of particle physics cannot explain why particles have mass, what dark matter is, or why matter survived over antimatter after the Big Bang. The team will search for the Higgs boson—the particle thought to give mass to others—and for supersymmetry, a proposed extension of the Standard Model that could account for dark matter. They will also study the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, and measure proton structure at unprecedented energies. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. However, similar curiosity-driven research into particle physics has historically produced technologies that quietly underpin modern life: the World Wide Web was invented at CERN, and particle detectors now form the basis of medical PET scanners. A deeper understanding of matter’s fundamental building blocks could, over decades, lead to new materials, energy sources, or computing methods that are impossible to predict today.
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The Queen Mary Experimental Particle Physics Group has an exciting set of particle physics experiments at the forefront of the field. Members of the Group have been working on the design, R&D, construction and commissioning of the ATLAS detector at the CERN LHC which is just starting to see real data in the form of cosmic ray and a few beam splash events. They are being joined by colleagues from the H1 and BaBar experiments whose analyses are coming to an end after many years of extremely productive results including measurements of CP violation in the bottom quark sector that were recognized in the award of the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics. The ATLAS Group has also been joined by colleagues from the CDF experiment who are experts on the top quark. The ATLAS group will continue the study of the top quark at the LHC and the expertise gained will allow us to probe for new physics such as the discovery of the Higgs particle or Supersymmetry. We will also continue our study of proton structure at the highest possible energies. The Queen Mary Group is also starting to get involved in upgrades to the ATLAS detector for the higher luminosity Super-LHC, first by participating in the ATLAS Tracker Upgrade programme and later in possible Trigger upgrades. At the other end of the mass scale other colleagues from BaBar are currently building the T2K long baseline neutrino experiment in Japan which will continue the investigations of the recently discovered neutrino oscillations. In addition the Group will look to exploit new opportunities, such as Super B Factories or Linear Colliders when they become available.
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