Prof Eram Rizvi

Eram Rizvi

Professor in Physics

School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/spcs/staff/academics/profiles/erizvi.html
Centre for Fundamental Physics
Centre for Experimental and Applied Physics

Research

Interests

Eram Rizvi is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the LHC, and is studying the process of quark & anti-quark annihilation and the subsequent decay to muon and anti-muon. This process is sensitive to the distribution of quarks and gluons inside the proton, and therefore tells us about the dynamics of QCD - one of the four fundamental forces of nature. At high energies, this process is one of the main decay mechanisms for some new particles like a heavy Z' boson, or so-called Kaluza-Klein excitations of particles moving in hidden extra-dimensions.

Eram is also studying QCD in the Deep Inelastic Scattering of high energy electrons off the quark constituents of the proton at the H1 experiment in Hamburg, Germany. Precision measurements of the inclusive neutral and charged current cross sections provide complementary information about the quark and gluon content of the proton and his measurements allow stringent constraints to be placed on calculated processes at the LHC. These measurements are also sensitive to the Electroweak parts of the Standard Model and can be used to place limits on the quark radius.

He is also part of a small collaboration of theoreticians and experimentalists interested in the area of quantum gravity which has yet to be experimentally observed. It is hoped that at the very highest energy LHC collisions quantum gravity effects may become visible and lead to the production of micro black holes and the discovery of hidden extra-dimensions. Together with collaborators Eram has produced a state-of-the-art calculation and simulation of these processes, published as the computer program BlackMax which will help LHC physicists search for these new phenomena.