Responsive RAs for the Birmingham Experimental Particle Physics Programme

Particle physics is a subject that captures the public imagination and can become headline news when major discoveries take place, such as that of the Higgs boson. With a large data set already collected at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the prospect of much more in the future, we are at a very exciting moment in the field. Birmingham has a balanced programme of running experiments, exploiting the full reach of the LHC in both energy and precision. Through this proposal, we plan to recruit two new researchers to enhance our studies of the particle collisions and decays observed in the ATLAS and LHCb experiments, with the aim of searching for new clues as to the ultimate structure of matter and the forces of nature. In ATLAS, we will study very rare processes in which pairs of photons collide and interact through quantum loops. In LHCb we will look for dark photons, particles that may give clues as to the unknown nature of the Dark Matter or even Dark Energy that is known from astronomy to dominate the structure of the universe.

The group has various fast-developing interests in non-collider areas of particle physics. These include the NEWS-G experiment, where we are developing novel spherical gas detectors to search for mysterious dark matter particles in a region of their mass that is not yet well explored. One of the proposed positions is intended to spearhead the installation of a spherical gas detector experiment in a deep mine in Boulby, Yorkshire.

We are also active in preparations for next generation collider facilities, where the current focus in R&D into the detectors that will be required, which have to provide ultra-precise position and timing measurements in a difficult environment with very high radiation doses. The final requested position will work on the development of two of the most promising new detector technologies based on silicon sensors in our state-of-the-art clean rooms and irradiation facilities.