Sussex EPP Rolling Grant 2009

The work carried out at Sussex supports three experimental particle physics programmes, all recognised as areas of extremely high priority for STFC. First, we are bidding to join the ATLAS collaboraton at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. To this end, two of our faculty - already well established members of ATLAS - will, together with their sub-group, continue their work to identify signatures of the appearance of so-called supersymmetric particles within the ATLAS detector, as well as contributing towards the development of the trigger and the ATLAS upgrade. Second, we provide substantial intellectual leadership in the ongoing search for an electric dipole moment (EDM) of the neutron. Finding an EDM would represent unambiguous evidence for physics beyond the SM; conversely, the absence of any EDM, at the sensitivity for which we are aiming, would provide extremely severe constraints on models of new physics. This work also provides a link to cosmology, since the size of any neutron EDM is determined by the same CP-violating mechanism that underlies the dominance of matter over antimatter in the Universe. Third, we have an active programme of neutrino physics. We will maintain our long-standing involvement in the MINOS project, which investigates the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations (the transmutation of neutrinos from one type to another) by sending a beam of neutrinos 734 km through the Earth from Fermilab to a detector in northern Minnesota. We also propose to participate in SNO+, an exciting new project that has emerged from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and which has several physics goals such as the study of geoneutrinos, the measurement of low-energy neutrinos from the Sun, and, possibly most important of all, a measurement of neutrinoless double-beta decay, which could both determine the mass of the neutrino and answer the long-standing question of whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle.