Particle Physics

Our centre has been conducting world-leading research on the fundamental constituents of the universe and the forces that bind them together for nearly five decades. One of our goals is to conduct precision measurements and searches for new phenomena at the Large Hadron Collider through the ATLAS and MoEDAL experiments. We aim to understand the Higgs boson by measuring couplings to second-generation fermions and search for di-Higgs production to constrain the triple Higgs coupling. We also search for new physics directly, such as Dark Matter, and indirectly, such as Precision Electroweak and rare B-decays.

Our research group is also at the forefront of neutrino research, conducting cutting-edge measurements of neutrino interactions with matter through experiments like NOvA and MINERvA. We are leading the world in measurements of neutrino oscillations with the NOvA and DUNE experiments, which could potentially lead to the discovery of charge-parity violation in the neutrino sector. This discovery could have significant implications for understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe.

Our research is strengthened by the development of innovative detector and accelerator technologies, which have strong industry ties. Examples of these technologies include zero-mass detectors, organic radiation detection, and Lhara (Laser-hybrid Accelerator for Radiobiological Applications). Additionally, we rely on large-scale distributed and federated scientific computing tools like GridPP and STFC-IRIS to enable our research efforts.

Display of a candidate Higgs-boson event decaying to two muons from proton-proton collisions recorded by ATLAS in 2015 at a collision energy of 13 TeV. The event contains two muons (red tracks) with invariant mass m(μ,μ)=124 GeV and two forward jets (yellow cones) with invariant mass m(jet,jet)=1237 GeV. Credit: ATLAS/CERN