Experiments

PPD, in collaboration with colleagues from UK Universities (link opens in a new window), is involved in many high energy physics (HEP) projects and running experiments located at different research institutes around the world. Key projects and activities include:

1. The construction, installation and exploitation of experiments to study physics at the TeV scale at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (link opens in a new window) at CERN (link opens in a new window), the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (located in Geneva, Switzerland).
   
   
   • Proton-proton physics at the LHC - ATLAS and CMS
   • Beauty physics at the LHC - LHCb
   
   
2. The development, in conjunction with the e-Science Department (link opens in a new window) and the UK Tier 1 Centre (link opens in a new window) at RAL, of advanced Grid computing facilities and software, required for the analysis of data from the LHC at CERN.
   
   
3. The search for new phenomena in precision experiments:
   
   
   • The nEDM experiment (link opens in a new window) at the Institute-Laue Langevin, ILL (link opens in a new window) (located at Grenoble, France)
   • The search for dark-matter - ZEPLIN-III (link opens in a new window) at the Boulby Mine (located at Whitby, UK)
   • Neutrino oscillation studies with MINOS (link opens in a new window) at the Fermi National Laboratory, FNAL (link opens in a new window) (located near Chicago and the Soudan Mine, USA)
   • Next generation long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment - T2K at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, KEK (link opens in a new window) (located at Tokai (link opens in a new window) and Kamioka, Japan)
   
   
4. The creation, in conjunction with the Accelerator Science and Technology (ASTeC (link opens in a new window)) Department, of a strong programme of accelerator and detector R&D directed towards future particle physics facilities such as a linear collider or neutrino factory
   
   
   • R&D on accelerators for Particle Physics and medicine - including MICE (link opens in a new window) at RAL (link opens in a new window) and EMMA (link opens in a new window) at Daresbury (link opens in a new window)
   • Linear Collider Detector R&D
   
   
5. The exploitation and analysis of results from recently completed collider experiments:
   
   
   • Electron-proton Collisions at HERA (link opens in a new window) - ZEUS (link opens in a new window) and H1 (link opens in a new window) at Deutsches Elektronen SYnchrotron laboratory DESY (link opens in a new window) (located in Hamburg, Germany)
   • Beauty physics at PEP-II (link opens in a new window) with BaBar at SLAC (link opens in a new window) - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (located near San Francisco, California)
   
   
6. Collaboration between theorists and experimentalists as part of the NExT Institute (link opens in a new window)