ATLAS
ATLAS
The ATLAS experiment is one of the general purpose detectors installed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ATLAS is a collaboration of 183 institutes from 38 different countries. The ATLAS group at the University of Warwick has been a member since February 2012.
The Large Hadron Collider, located on the Swiss-French border, is the highest energy particle collider ever constructed. Currently operating with beams of protons at an energy of 6.8 TeV brought into collision at four points on the ring, which has a circumference of 27km. At one of these collision points the ATLAS experiment operates, collecting as much information as possible about the interactions.
The 2012 observation of a new particle in the search for the Higgs Boson created much excitement. ATLAS was one of two experiments involved in the search for this much sought after particle at the LHC and published a paper on the observation of a new particle. One of the important tasks now is measuring the properties of this new object.
The LHC Run 2, from 2015 to 2018, delivered five times the data of Run 1 at higher energy. This large dataset is being used by Warwick physicists for detailed studies of the Higgs boson and the top quark and in searches for New Physics. Run 3 started in 2022, with even more data expected.
People
Academics
Prof. Bill Murray (Group leader - enquiries for fellowship or studentship enquiries welcome)
Assoc. Prof. Karolos Potamianos
Research Fellows
Muhammad Alhroob
Vacancy
Hardware Staff
Vacancy
Dr Ankush Mitra
PhD Students
Miss Roxani Lazaridou
Miss Eva Guilloton
Mr Mo Ghani
Miss Rachel Ashby-Pickering
Mr Joel Davidson
Mr Snigdho Chakraborty
Prospective Students
Refer to this link for Ph.D. proposals in ATLAS and the rest of the EPP group.
Research Interests
The Warwick ATLAS group is involved in a variety of fundemental research topics using the unprecedented dataset LHC produces. We are working on searches for additional Higgs bosons and Higgs boson pair production and are studying Higgs decays to W and tau pairs, and the study of high momentum Higgs bosons with decay to b pairs. Other research directions include the precise measurements of known processes, such as the fragmentation that creates jets from quarks, and measuring the CKM matrix element V(cb) in top quark decay. We are also looking for long-lived particles, decaying at large distance from the interaction point.
In addition to these activities the Warwick group are also involved in a variety of detector performance tasks related to the trigger. The trigger, which consists of both hardware and software elements, is the part of ATLAS which decides if an event observed by the detector is kept for further processing. This is necessary given that in the duration of one second there are hundreds of millions of collisions out of which only a few hundred may be stored. Our involvement consists of general trigger configuration and development of new algorithms to handle the challenging and evolving environment of the typical collision.
The ATLAS detector will be upgraded with a new silicon detector and updated trigger system. We are responsible for the Quality Control of the silicon strip detector modules, a share of module construction and for parts of the trigger core software restructuring and cost monitoring.