Particle physics
Here are scientists related to this topic. Choose one to read about their work and ask them your questions.
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Susan Cartwright
Current Job: Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astrophysics, University of Sheffield
My latest work:
I am currently working on neutrinos from supernovae. Just over 30 years ago, a couple of dozen neutrinos were detected from a massive star that exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160 thousand light years away. Someday – preferably someday quite soon! – a similar massive star will be seen to explode in our own Galaxy (we expect that this happens about twice per century, on average), and with much larger neutrino detectors and a closer source, we would expect to see thousands of neutrinos. This has the potential to lead to a greater understanding of the process by which massive stars explode, which is not only interesting in its own right but important in understanding how we came to be here: the oxygen you are breathing was produced in just such a massive-star explosion. We are trying to understand the extent to which observations of neutrinos from a Galactic supernova could help us to distinguish between different models of the explosion (and perhaps also tell us more about neutrinos themselves).
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Carsten Welsch
Current Job: Professor and Head of Physics Department
My latest work:
We are designing a special monitor that can characterize the beam of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. There will be an upgrade to the world’s largest and highest energy accelerator which will make it even more powerful – so powerful, that the current diagnostics to fully characterize the proton beam will no longer work.
We are using a supersonic jet which we cross with the main LHC beam to measure the proton beam – (almost) without touching it. The monitor is a very sophisticated piece of equipment and we are excited to contribute this to the HL-LHC.
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Scott Lawrie
Current Job: Particle Accelerator Physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
My latest work:
I’m project manager and lead designer of a big particle accelerator upgrade. We’re aiming to replace clunky Soviet-era technology with something modern, efficient and beautiful. This involves hundreds of kilowatts of power, lots of electromagnets and over a million pounds of expense! I’m really excited to be putting it all together to see if my designs work as planned, and to improve the entire accelerator complex for our visiting scientists.
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Anne Green
Current Job: Physics Professor
My latest work:
I’m trying to understand what dark matter is. This invisible, exotic stuff makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe. Currently I’m mostly working on testing the idea that dark matter is primordial black holes, black holes that were made in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
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David Ho
Current Job: PhD Research Student
My latest work:
I’m studying a phenomenon where a strong enough magnetic field is actually unstable, and if we could get a magnet strong enough we’d get particles popping out of thin air.
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Meirin Oan Evans
Current Job: PhD student at the University of Sussex and CERN
My latest work:
I prepare CERN data to release openly for use in education with students of about 16 and older. All goes on http://opendata.atlas.cern
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Leah Morgan
Current Job: Graduate Diagnostic Mechanical Engineer
My latest work:
I’m a physics graduate working as an engineer in fusion energy!
My main projects include designing and installing radiation shielding for some of the equipment close to our fusion reactor. We have a lot of high-energy experiments coming up and we know the radiation is going to destroy all the electronics, fibre optic cables, and rubber seals!
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Lucy Budge
Current Job: PhD Student
My latest work:
I’m currently working on collider physics – looking at specific processes that happen when we collide protons at experiments like the LHC at CERN.
Specifically I’m studying processes involving the Higgs boson and 4 gluons, this requires a lot of maths since the Higgs doesn’t interact directly with gluons! So we have to add in what’s known as a “loop” (in our case a top quark).
The image below is an example of a loop:
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Edoardo Vescovi
Current Job: Postdoctoral researcher
My latest work:
I am a theoretical physicist working on simple models of the complex system of nature, at the intersection of mathematics and physics. It is all about simple models of particles that do not directly relate to matter in our universe, but they are simple enough to test and develop mathematical tools that could be used to study matter one day. For example, in these toy models we know how to calculate the force between charged particles and the energy emitted by them in the form of light, all this from little input and few basic mathematical rules. The dream is that a simple description can be possible for our universe as well.
Very loosely speaking, in some of these toy models I have recently derived a formula for the light emission of an accelerated particle and a formula for the attraction of baryons (particles qualitatively similar to protons in atomic nuclei).
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Harrison Prosper
Current Job: Kirby W. Kemper Endowed Professor of Physics, FSU, USA
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Philippe Gambron
Current Job: Computational scientist
My latest work:
My background is in particle physics and I am trying to pursue it on the side but, at the moment, I am working in high performance computing.
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Savannah Clawson
Current Job: PhD Student at the University of Manchester (currently based at CERN)
My latest work:
I am currently working on making the first observation of the process of two light particles (photons) smashing together to produce two W-bosons (these are particles that belong to the so-called Weak Force). This process is interesting because a lot of new physics theories predict that it is more likely to happen compared to the same process in our “Standard Model” of physics – so if we see anything unexpected, this would be new physics and a new discovery!