Physics Department News

Warwick's particle physics group shipped out the first detector module to the T2K project in Japan. The P0D ECal module for the near-detector (ND280) is the first of  five more to be built at Warwick. It will be installed with the other ECal modules built by our collaborators at Liverpool, Daresbury, Sheffield and Lancaster. For more information see our T2K project web pages. View the news footage courtesy of David Gregory at BBC Midlands Today.

 

The department Welcomes Elme Breedt who will be joining the Astrophysics group to study the structure of accreting white dwarf systems. Elme recently completed her PhD at the University of Southampton, where she was studying the relationship between the X-ray and optical variability of Seyfert galaxies.

 

The Itanium Solutions Alliance has recently high-lighted in a case study for the general press work done here in the Physics Department and the Centre for Scientific Computing by Dr. Rudolf A. Roemer and co-workers. This case study explains in simple words the new and much improved numerical solutions to the problem of large scale quantum problems within scientific computation. Please see the link for the case study which explains this more [link].

The LHCb and T2K experiments at the CERN and J-PARC laboratories have recorded their first events last week representing a major milestone for both experiments, to which the Warwick Particle Physics Group are making significant contributions. Graduate student Mark Whitehead was "on shift" at CERN over the weekend of 20-22 November and as such was in charge of LHCb while the first events were recorded. Gary Barker is leading the construction here at Warwick of large calorimeter modules for T2K, and the group are preparing for the first data analysis. Further details are available in the CERN and J-PARC press releases:

  

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html

 

http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2009/J-PARCT2K2.html