Physicists at Lancaster University are smashing particles together at the Tevatron and Large Hadron Collider, and catching ghostly neutrinos in Japan, to map the universe’s first moments after the Big Bang. This research tackles a fundamental gap in knowledge: why the universe is made of matter rather than nothing at all. The team is hunting for CP violation—a subtle difference between matter and antimatter behaviour—in both particle collisions and neutrino oscillations. They are also probing the Higgs boson to understand how mass arises, and searching for supersymmetry and extra dimensions, which would reshape the Standard Model of particle physics. This is curiosity-driven fundamental science. There is no immediate practical application. However, similar work on particle detectors and computing grids has already spun off technologies used in medical imaging and high-performance computing. If the team finds CP violation in neutrinos, it could explain the matter-antimatter imbalance that allowed galaxies, stars, and planets to form. The Cockcroft Institute’s accelerator research may also lead to more compact, efficient particle beams for cancer therapy or materials science—though those are decades away. For now, the payoff is a deeper understanding of why anything exists at all.
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This research is aimed at understanding the properties of the basic building blocks of the Universe (the elementary particles) and the nature of the fundamental forces which govern the interactions of these particles. In so doing, deep insights will be gained about the origin and evolution of the Universe, especially in the first moments after the Big Bang. The Lancaster research programme covers all the main types of accelerator facilities and is based on hadron collider physics with the Tevatron (Fermilab) and LHC (CERN) machines, and the observation of long baseline neutrino oscillations in Japan. All of this work will be underpinned by Lancaster's expertise in characterising and understanding the properties of heavily irradiated silicon particle detectors, in operating high performance computing facilities on the Grid and in writing offline event reconstruction software. The hadron collider physics is expected to reveal detailed properties of B hadrons (containing heavy b-quarks) including the mixing of neutral B mesons containing strange quarks, and CP violation which is related to the existence of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. Searches for new physics at the LHC will focus on understanding the origin of mass (and the role of the Higgs boson), the existence of new symmetries of nature (e.g. supersymmetry) and extra spatial dimensions. The neutrino oscillations programme is expected to provide important information about the masses of and the amount of mixing amongst the three known species of neutrinos. If the appearance of electron neutrinos can be well measured in a muon neutrino beam then it may be possible, in a further phase of the research, to establish the existence of CP violation in the neutrino sector of the Standard Model. This could have wide reaching implications for the understanding of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. The development of new particle accelerator technology for high energy particle physics and a broad range of alternaive applications is the mission of the Cockcroft Institute. The Lancaster group were co-founders of the Institute and remain commited to supporting its evolution.
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