UCL Experimental Particle Physics Responsive PDRA Call (2023-2025)
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
Experimental particle physics studies extremely small sizes, or equivalently high energies. We seek to understand the nature of the physical universe in terms of fundamental forces and particles to answer the simple question: how did our universe evolve? Experiments capable of reaching these extremes are technically demanding, requiring precision detectors which can operate in hostile environments, particle accelerators which can collide beams at very high energies, super-sensitive detectors capable of identifying very rare decays, high-speed electronics to read a million pieces of information per second & software to analyse petabytes of data using the latest data-mining techniques.
This grant funds responsive PDRA posts in experimental particle physics. Post-doctoral research assistants (PDRA's) form the cornerstone of our physics research. Training these highly skilled early career scientists lays the foundation for future science leadership while allowing us to exploit current scientific opportunities. These scientific opportunities include:
- Understand the properties and exact nature of the Higgs boson and search for new physics at the LHC with the ATLAS experiment.
- Understand why we live in a universe dominated by matter rather than anti-matter, in contrast to the conditions immediately after the Big Bang. UCL will analyse data from SuperNEMO which will help to shed light on the nuclear processes underlying the incredibly rare process of double-beta decay. This will help in the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, the observation of which would yield fundamental insights into how the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry may have arisen.
- Search for phenomena at extremely high energies, well beyond the reach of man-made accelerators. The PUEO experiment searches for ultra-high energy neutrino interactions in Antarctica, and we will explore the opportunities offered by a new neutrino telescope in the Pacific Ocean will be explored.
- Share our results with other scientists and industry. Our accelerator and dectector expertise as well as our leadership in big-data, can be applied to various sectors of academic and the wider economy.
This grant funds responsive PDRA posts in experimental particle physics. Post-doctoral research assistants (PDRA's) form the cornerstone of our physics research. Training these highly skilled early career scientists lays the foundation for future science leadership while allowing us to exploit current scientific opportunities. These scientific opportunities include:
- Understand the properties and exact nature of the Higgs boson and search for new physics at the LHC with the ATLAS experiment.
- Understand why we live in a universe dominated by matter rather than anti-matter, in contrast to the conditions immediately after the Big Bang. UCL will analyse data from SuperNEMO which will help to shed light on the nuclear processes underlying the incredibly rare process of double-beta decay. This will help in the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, the observation of which would yield fundamental insights into how the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry may have arisen.
- Search for phenomena at extremely high energies, well beyond the reach of man-made accelerators. The PUEO experiment searches for ultra-high energy neutrino interactions in Antarctica, and we will explore the opportunities offered by a new neutrino telescope in the Pacific Ocean will be explored.
- Share our results with other scientists and industry. Our accelerator and dectector expertise as well as our leadership in big-data, can be applied to various sectors of academic and the wider economy.
Organisations
Publications
Aad G
(2023)
Search for Higgs boson pair production in association with a vector boson in pp collisions at $$\sqrt{s}=13\,\text {TeV}$$ with the ATLAS detector
in The European Physical Journal C