Hello and welcome to my page! I’m a second year PhD student at the University of Warwick whose research interests lie in the field of experimental neutrino physics. Before this, I studied at Lancaster University where I completed a Theoretical Physics MPhys degree. My masters project was a study of the feasibility of the measurement of the gluon transverse momentum dependent parton distribution functions at ATLAS.

My Research

Long-baseline neutrino experiments have contributed much to our understanding of the world around us teaching us, for example, that neutrinos have mass. But accompanying these new discoveries are more questions - where does this mass come from? how do these masses compare to one another? and do neutrinos hold the answer to the matter-antimatter asymmetry and thus to our existence? Seeking to answer these questions is the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a liquid argon-based neutrino experiment that, at its deepest point, is situated 1.5 km beneath the US surface.

DUNE has three main goals; to measure to unprecedented precision the neutrino oscillation parameters, to observe proton decay, should it exist, and to detect the emitted neutrinos from a potential supernova burst. To achieve these goals, we must be able to interpret neutrino interactions in the detector with high accuracy and at the heart of this process is the event reconstruction. The leader in this field is the Pandora reconstruction software which employs a multi-algorithm approach to event reconstruction. It is the goal of this PhD to work with the Pandora team, lead by John Marshall, to improve the Pandora reconstruction software such that it is able to handle the high multiplicity of DUNE events.

The initial stages of this project have focused on improvements to the cosmic ray reconstruction at the DUNE far detector which is of significant importance to the calibration of the detector. As the project moves into the second year, calibration remains the focus and the potential use of delta rays for energy calibration will be studied and their reconstruction optimised. Following this, the main analysis work will begin. This will be a study of the relationship between the performance of the pattern recognition and the sensitivity of DUNE to the CP violating phase with a goal to optimise the latter and finish with an oscillation analysis.

Contact Details

Office: P432

Email: isobel.mawby@warwick.ac.uk

Department of Physics

University of Warwick

Coventry

West Midlands, UK

CV4 7AL