Later this year, the Large Hadron Collider will start smashing protons together at energies never before reached on Earth. This research addresses a fundamental gap in physics: our current best theory of particles and forces, the Standard Model, cannot explain why the Universe contains so much matter and so little antimatter. The Cambridge group will use two detectors—ATLAS and LHCb—to search for answers. ATLAS will look for predicted particles like Z-bosons to test whether the Standard Model holds at ten trillion electron volts, and will hunt for supersymmetric particles and signs of extra dimensions. LHCb will measure subtle differences between matter and antimatter to explain why antimatter is nearly absent from the cosmos. This is curiosity-driven fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But similar work at earlier colliders led to technologies now used in medical imaging, cancer therapy, and the World Wide Web. A deeper understanding of why matter dominates over antimatter would reshape our picture of the early Universe and the laws that govern it. The group also completes data analysis on the MINOS neutrino experiment, which studies how neutrinos change type—a phenomenon that could one day inform new approaches to nuclear monitoring or long-range communication.
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The Large Hadron Collider will begin to deliver data in October 2009. The Cambridge group has participated in the construction of the ATLAS and LHCb detectors which will explore the physics progresses taking place in the 10 TeV energy regime opened up by the new collider. In ATLAS the group will be making measurements of expected processes like Z-boson production, in order to test whether the predictions of our current theories still hold at high energy. We will also be searching directly for the production of supersymmetric particles, predicted in many theoretical models, and for evidence of the existence of extra space dimensions. In LHCb, we will make measurements aimed at understanding the differences between matter and antimatter, and hence explaining why the Universe we live in appears to contain very little antimatter. In order to pursue this research we will need to work on the operation and calibration of the detector systems we work with. These include the tracking system in ATLAS, which measures the paths of particles, and the RICH detector in LHCb, which can distinguish between different particle types. Since the LHC will in future operate at a higher intensity, we also plan to develop detector technologies capable of working at much higher rates. In parallel, we will develop detector systems for future experiments. We also participate in the MINOS experiment, which studies the properties of neutrinos, and in particular their ability to transmute between neutrino types. We will complete our data analysis work on this experiment, to get the maximum return on the investment made to date.
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