Luke Grazette

I am an Elementary Particle Physics 4th (final) year PhD candidate, working on the LHCb Experiment, one of the experiments based on the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Switzerland. Supervised by Mika A. Vesterinen and Ross J. Hunter and started on 03/10/2022.

Last Updated: 01-May-2026

Research:

The LHCb Upgrade detector is a major change from the previous detector, including the ability to operate at a five times greater instantaneous luminosity than previously possible. Electroweak physics at the LHCb has been incredibly successful using the legacy dataset, but several key measurements are statistically limited with that dataset. My principal activity is the first electroweak measurement using the LHCb Upgrade dataset, a measurement of inclusive fiducial cross sections for electroweak boson production through muon decays.

Early Career Scientist Awards (2025) from the LHCb Collaboration:

For their transformative work on the Bandwidth division of HLT1, HLT2 and Sprucing, enabling the physics exploitation of the full software trigger.

Contributions to the experiment:

Comprehensive bandwidth testing infrastructure for the LHCb Upgrade trigger (July-2023:May-2026)
Facilitated test-driven development of the trigger in over 500 merge requests and data-driven decision making by LHCb management. Continued interactions with different author groups (analysts, trigger developers, management) to streamline communication and time to insight while identifying potential areas of improvement.
Infrastructure to automate validation, generation, evaluation and deployment of trigger configurations (Oct-2023:May-2026):
Ensured consistency and reproducibility of over 200 trigger configurations for use in data-taking operations, streamlined the work of trigger experts and more than 20 trigger operators.
First 'super-liaison' for the QEE working group (Aug-2023:Sept 2023):
Defined and documented systematic and mechanical checks of the 2023 data-taking for the QEE working group during the six week period of the ''super-liaison'' effort. Created data processing templates to access the 2023 data over seven different sets of physics selections. Analysed the data and identified necessary changes required for a successful data-taking during 2024.
Trigger and data-processing liaison the QEE working group (Jan-2023:Jan-2025):
Facilitated over a two year term an enhanced participation and improved communications between the QEE physics working group and the computing efforts for current data-taking. Organised, coordinated and directly contributed to the implementation, validation, tuning and testing of trigger developments from the working group, from both a code quality and physics performance perspective. Supported analysts and reviewed with over 60 trigger developments and over 50 data processing requests.

Outreach and teaching:

Senior graduate teaching assistant (Oct-2022:Mar-2023, Jan-2025:Mar-2025):
Taught over three academic terms, with responsibilities including both supervision, leading and marking of small-group teaching (up to 30 students between two teachers). Spent several hundred hours between practical undergraduate laboratory experiments for first and second years and undergraduate physics problem classes for first years. Utilised this experience to create documentation with detailed instructions, example datasets and plots for future laboratory assistants, thus streamlining future demonstrations.
LHCb Starterkit Workshop Teacher (2023, 2024):
Taught four hours of sessions at the annual workshop to introduce new starters to the LHCb software in 2023 and 2024, with approximately 100 attendees per workshop. Redesigned, wrote and taught the sessions on the LHCb Upgrade trigger, including lecture content and hands-on live-coding sessions. The redesign focused on both the lecture content and delivery while modernising and broadening examples, acting on feedback provided after each workshop. Resulted in reducing the negative feedback on those sessions from 62% in 2022 to 17% and then 6% in 2024 while also seeing an increase in positive qualitative feedback.
Visit to Robert Clack school (Jan-2023):
Organised and spoke as an alumni to KeyStage 4 and 5 students interested in Maths and Physics. Shared the experience and perspective from attending university, having taught early-year UnderGraduates and in doing a PhD. See: Article on the visit from the School : https://www.robertclack.co.uk/alumni-visits-y11-and-sixth-form-students
Princethorpe college's trip to CERN (Jan-2023):
Met some very promising KeyStage 5 students from the local Warwick area who flew out to CERN. Spoke to them specifically about my research here at CERN and what it means to do research more broadly. The organiser of the trip had some high praise for the trip and the students' response to the talk. Including 'Your presentation was really well pitched to their level of knowledge and was clearly explained.', 'Trying to contextualise what you are doing and placing it in the real world is important and you did that really well' and finishing with 'The pupils found it extremely interesting and inspiring'.

Luke Grazette presenting to KS4/5 students currently at Robert Clack Secondary School/College

Selected publications:

L. Grazette et al., Infrastructure for deployment and evaluation of LHCb trigger configurations, EPJ Web Conf., 337 (2025) 01116.
Role: Involved in conception, sole developer of infrastructure, presented at internal and public conferences, prepared and submitted manuscript.
L. Grazette et al., A Comprehensive Bandwidth Testing Framework for the LHCb Upgrade Trigger System, EPJ Web Conf., 337 (2025) 01261.
Role: Involved in early planning stages, primary developer of framework focused on new features, presented at internal conferences, reviewed manuscript.
Y. Amhis et al., Report from the Early Measurements Task Force, CERN-LHCb-INT-2024-003 (2024).
Role: Performed as one of three superliaisons from QEE working group, created data processing requests and analysis of early data, presented at internal meetings, wrote and coordinated writing of relevant section of manuscript.
LHCb Collaboration, Invariant mass of $Z \to \mu^+\mu^-$ in 2024 data, LHCB-FIGURE-2024-020 (2024).
Role: Primary proponent of analysis, created data processing requests and calibrated data, compared to legacy datasets and generated plots, presented at internal conferences.

Contact Details:

Offices:
- PS0.04@Warwick,

- 13/1.042@CERN

Telephone:

- 0041 22 76 63877

E-Mail:

- luke.grazette@cern.ch