Physicists at the University of Warwick are smashing protons together at CERN and firing neutrinos across Japan to test the Standard Model of particle physics to its breaking point. The research addresses a fundamental gap: the Standard Model explains ordinary matter but cannot account for why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter, nor why neutrinos have mass at all. The team is hunting for new sources of CP violation—the asymmetry that might explain matter's dominance—by studying beauty quark decays at LHCb, and measuring whether neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate at different rates using the T2K experiment. They are also searching for the Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons at ATLAS, and looking for neutrinoless double beta decay with SuperNEMO, which would reveal whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. However, the accelerator and detector research and development they pursue—for future neutrino factories—could eventually spin off into improved medical imaging or industrial sensing. Past fundamental particle physics research gave us the World Wide Web and hadron therapy for cancer; deeper understanding of matter's basic properties may yield similarly unanticipated tools.
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The scope of the proposed research lies in five distinct areas: Higgs and new phenomena searches at the ATLAS Experiment; the physics of particles containing the beauty quark at LHCb; the physics of neutrinos with T2K and SuperNEMO; accelerator research and development for new high intensity proton, muon and neutrino beams; detector R&D. It also includes Outreach and Knowledge Exchange programmes. In more detail: o The ATLAS experiment at CERN, a large, general purpose detector operating at the LHC was designed to search for and study the Higgs boson, as well as new exotic forms of matter. Our work involves contributing to the experiment's ability to identify interesting events as well as helping to construct an upgraded detector able to work in the new environment of an upgraded LHC. We will also contribute to the detailed study of the Higgs boson by helping to optimise the collection of events in which it decays to pairs of tau leptons, heavy relatives of the electron. We will also look for other, heavier exotic new bosons. o We aim to further our research into matter/anti-matter asymmetry (CP Violation) in the decays of Beauty mesons at the LHCb experiment. This is important, because we have shown in past experiments that the leading source of CP violation at the weak scale is consistent with the Standard Model mechanism of CP violation. However, cosmological considerations indicate that there should be other sources of CP violation in Nature, so we aim to make further sensitive tests with beauty mesons, in order to see if any evidence for additional sources of CP violation appear in such decays. We also plan to study rare decays of B mesons, which may be able to indicate the presence of new types of interactions outside the Standard Model of particle physics. o The elucidation of the properties of neutrinos. We have built part of the T2K experiment which is now operating in Japan. Analyses of T2K data has helped to show conclusively that neutrinos transmute or `oscillate' from one type to the other. We aim to continue running this experiment, to better measure these oscillations, and to establish whether the rate of oscillation is the same for anti-neutrinos. In parallel, we are deeply involved with preparations for the next generation of oscillation experiment. These projects, DUNE and Hyper-K, are coming to the end of the preparatory phase and we are making various contributions in both hardware and software to help enable the experiments to be ready for data taking around 2026. We further plan to contribute to the SuperNEMO experiment, which aims to determine the nature of the neutrino as a so-called Dirac or Majorana particle. The former has distinct anti-particles, while the latter is its own antiparticle. This question may be resolved by searching for double beta decay accompanied by no neutrinos. We will contribute to the analysis of data obtained by a "demonstrator module" attempting to observe such decays. o We propose to continue our research and development of high power accelerators for the generation of proton, muon and neutrino beams. We have in mind future neutrino factories, although other machines could benefit from our research. Such neutrino factories, if built, would continue to develop the theme of research into neutrino oscillations and matter-antimatter asymmetry of neutrinos as outlined above. Such machines could also bring many benefits to medicine and industry. o We propose to continue our research and development of position- and energy-sensitive detectors for applications in neutrino experiments and with potential spin-off applications in industry. o We will continue to develop our outreach programme which includes activities for local schools and articles in popular science publications. o Supported by a strong University strategy and ethos in knowledge exchange, we will continue to pursue all avenues for possible knowledge exchange
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