Welcome to the Birmingham Particle Physics Group homepage. We are a large research group within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, investigating the ultimate structure of matter and the forces of nature. You can find lots of information on who we are, our activities and opportunities from the menu on the left and news-feed on the right.
The group's
history stretches back to the 1950s and the bubble chamber era. More recently, it
includes the W and Z boson discoveries at the UA1 experiment, precision measurements in the
electroweak sector at OPAL and detailed mapping of the proton structure at H1.
There's a collection of group photographs taken over the years here .
Our main current activities are based at
the CERN
laboratory in Geneva. We have a central involvement in the
ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider,
where we are characterising the recently discovered Higgs boson in multiple ways,
investigating top quark and multi-boson signatures and studying processes
in which one or both of the protons remains intact.
We are testing lepton universality and investigating subtle effects in rare baryon decays
at the
LHCb experiment.
We have senior leadership roles in the NA62
experiment, where we are making measurements of ultra-rare decays of strange particles
to search for new physics effects in quantum loops.
We have a fast-growing involvement in direct searches for dark matter,
both through preparations for WIMP searches at the 50 tonne liquid argon
Darkside-20k experiment and through the novel application of
spherical proportional counters with NEWS-G .
We are working towards future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments
as members of the
DUNE collaboration.
Our interests in a wide range of possible future ep,
e+e- and pp collider facilities are helping to shape the future of
the field for the coming decades.
Our local facilities include a 200m2 set of clean rooms comprising the
BILPA
laboraory for silicon detector development and construction. As well as playing a
major role in the upgrade programme of the ATLAS experiment for the high luminosity
phase of the LHC, the BILPA is performing R&D into next-generation sensors
and technology-transfer into instrumentation for hadron therapy. We also have
extensive capabilities for the design, construction and firmware programming of
state-of-the-art
trigger and data acquisition systems and host a substantial GridPP site
as part of the world-wide LHC distributed computing network.
The group has a wide-ranging and innovative public engagement programme and supports
particle physics education within schools. Please do contact us if you are interested!
Our research is supported primarily by the
Science and Technology Facilities Council
with additional current grants from the
Royal Society and the
European Research Council.
