UK invests £72 million on cutting edge particle physics research

11 Dec 2015 10:33 AM

Cutting edge particle physics research in the UK will receive £72m over the next four years enabling researchers to focus on answering some of the big questions we still have in understanding the Universe such as the mysteries of Dark Matter - the ‘stuff’ that is believed to make up a big percentage of our Universe but that cannot be seen.

Announced yesterday by STFC this funding will support 17 UK university research teams to actively work on some of the “…unfinished business with understanding the universe” that Professor Tara Shears, who leads the University of Liverpool LHCb group, has talked about as being one of the current research challenges.

Professor John Womersley, particle physicist and Chief Executive of STFC said of the funding announcement

“The UK’s Particle physicists are world leaders in expanding our understanding of some of the biggest and deepest questions in science. The support we announced yesterday will enable this incredibly successful research community not only to analyse the new data coming from CERN but also to work on developing new applications for particle physics technology and to continue to inspire future generations with the excitement of discovering how the universe works”.

Particle physics research is largely international and collaborative in nature, and the UK research teams are working on twelve particle physics experiments, including contributing to the work at CERN involving the exploitation of the Large Hadron Collider as well as other major international experiments in the US, Canada and Japan.

The key questions these research projects are looking at include why do we see more matter than antimatter; what is the nature of the force that binds quarks, and nucleons, together; what are the limits of this force; are forces unified at high energies; where does the mass of particles come from; what is the missing dark matter which seems to make up about a quarter of the Universe; and what is the "Dark Energy" which may drive the expansion of the Universe?

STFC funded physicists are working on the exploitation and development of all four of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) detectors ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE, although the latter is funded through the STFC’s nuclear physics programme. They are also actively involved in some of the ground breaking experiments in the study of neutrino masses and mixing such as T2K (Tokai-to-Kamiokande in Japan), MICE (Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment in the UK) and preparation for the next generation of experiments – the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at Fermilab in the USA, and Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan.

The UK has also invested in leading roles in the SNO+ (Canada) and SuperNEMO (France) neutrinoless double beta decay demonstrator experiments, which continue to receive support along with experiments in precision muons, electric dipole moment and quark flavour physics.

STFC also supports an active theory community, fundamental to the progress and understanding of experimental particle physics, both in the short term in relating to currently operational experiments, as well as in the longer term of proposing new ideas which will become the focus experiments in the future.

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STFC Media contact:

Jake Gilmore

On behalf of the UK research groups STFC funds operations and analysis work at CERN and elsewhere for running experiments and also underpins the funds awarded to new projects and upgrades, helping to secure the UK’s international scientific leadership and core technology capability. Each UK university group contributes to a number of different running experiments and projects, and often with responsibility for different scientific/technical areas.

The experimental programme awarded is consistent with the STFC 2013 Programmatic Review priorities, follows the strategic guidance from Science Board to maintain breadth and balance in the programme, ensures a stable funding environment for the high priority running experiments and ensures as far as is possible that previous research investments made can be fully exploited. In addition to funding its high priority experiments, STFC is again continuing to support future opportunities where an excellent science case has been made for generic R&D and experiments otherwise not currently supported by STFC.