Experiments, Projects, and Activities of the Department

PPD, in collaboration with colleagues from UK Universities, is involved in many high energy physics (HEP) projects and running experiments located at different research institutes around the world. Key projects and activities include:

• The construction, installation and exploitation of experiments to study physics at the TeV scale at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (located in Geneva, Switzerland).
  • Proton-proton physics at the LHC — ATLAS and CMS
  • Beauty physics at the LHC — LHCb
• The development, in conjunction with the e-Science Department and the UK Tier 1 Centre at RAL, of advanced Grid computing facilities and software, required for the analysis of data from the LHC at CERN.
• The search for new phenomena in precision experiments:
  • The nEDM experiment at the Institute-Laue Langevin, ILL (located at Grenoble, France)
  • The search for dark-matter — ZEPLIN-III at the Boulby Mine (located at Whitby, UK)
  • Neutrino oscillation studies with MINOS at the Fermi National Laboratory, FNAL (located near Chicago and the Soudan Mine, USA)
  • Next generation long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment — T2K at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, KEK (located at Tokai and Kamioka, Japan)
• The creation, in conjunction with the Accelerator Science and Technology (ASTeC) Department, of a strong programme of accelerator and detector R&D directed towards future particle physics facilities such as a linear collider or neutrino factory
  • R&D on accelerators for Particle Physics and medicine including MICE at RAL and EMMA at Daresbury
  • Linear Collider Detector R&D
• The exploitation and analysis of results from recently completed collider experiments:
  • Electron-proton Collisions at HERA — ZEUS and H1 at Deutsches Elektronen SYnchrotron laboratory DESY (located in Hamburg, Germany).
  • Beauty physics at PEP-II with BaBar at SLAC — Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (located near San Francisco, California)
• Collaboration between theorists and experimentalists as part of the NExT Institute.