Physicists at Lancaster University are smashing particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and firing neutrinos through detectors in Japan to work out why the Universe contains matter at all. The problem is that the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated each other completely. Something tipped the balance, leaving behind the galaxies, stars, and planets we see today. This research aims to find that something by studying two phenomena: CP violation in particles called B hadrons, and CP violation in the behaviour of neutrinos. Both could explain why matter won out. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. The group also develops silicon particle detectors and accelerator technology at the Cockcroft Institute, which could eventually spin out into medical imaging or industrial scanning tools. But the core mission is understanding the Universe's basic rules. Past fundamental particle physics research gave us the World Wide Web and medical PET scanners; this work could one day yield similarly unexpected benefits from a deeper grasp of how matter behaves at its most basic level.
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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 LHC (CERN) machine, and the observation of long baseline neutrino oscillations in Japan and elsewhere. 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 role and nature 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. Equally, we work to develop particle detectors (silicon strip, pixel, LAr TPC) and technologies (CMOS) to benefit the field, but also with potential spin-out benefit to science and society.
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