UCL HEP Seminars 2004
: Jon Butterworth (UCL)
Implications of HERA measurements for the LHC
: Ofer Lahav (UCL)
Neutrinos and Cosmology
: Bill Murray (RAL)
Results from MuScat
Ionization cooling is foreseen for the muon collider and neutrino factory, and is to be tested in action in the Mice experiment at RAL. The cooling effect of dedx losses is offset by multiple scattering, which is difficult to calculate and has not been measured at the appropriate muon momenta. The MuScat experiment fixes that deficiency. The results of the MuScat experiment are presented, along with details of the performance.
: David Miller (UCL)
Physics at the Future Linear Collider
: Nikos Konstantinidis (UCL)
The Higgs Search: Past, present and future
Almost four years after the last data from LEP, (preparation for) the search for the wholy grail of particle physics continues. Starting with a quick review of LEP's legendary contribution to the Higgs searches, I will discuss (a) the more recent progress in precision electroweak measurements and the information they provide for the SM Higgs; and (b) the expectations in the coming years from the Tevatron and the LHC.
: David Evans (Birmingham)
"ALICE and the Physics of Quark Matter"
QCD predicts that hadronic matter, under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, will undergo a phase transition into a deconfined soup of quarks and gluons called a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) The University would have been in such a state some 10^-6 to 10^-5 seconds after the Big Bang. Colliding lead ions at LHC energies will produce such a QGP and the ALICE experiment will study QCD in detail under these extreme conditions.
: Costas Andreopoulos (RAL)
"The MINOS experiment: Just 7 months away from the first beam event!"
MINOS is a first generation long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to study the oscillation parameter space hinted at by the results of atmospheric neutrino experiments. In order to achieve this goal we plan to use two magnetized iron calorimeters with solid scintillator as active material: a 5.4 kt one in Soudan mine in Minnesota, 735 km away from an intense, low energy neutrino beam source at Fermilab, and a smaller 1 kt one just 1 km downstream of the neutrino source. Neutrino oscillation measurements will be carried on by comparing the neutrino event rates and spectra at the two detectors. In this talk, I will briefly summarize the current experimental evidence for neutrino oscillations and describe the current status of the MINOS experiment which is now very close to the end of its construction phase. I will also try to illustrate what challenges we are going to face, after the beam starts up, using highlights from my recent work in event reconstruction, event classification and neutrino interaction model tuning/validation.
: Simon Dean (Manchester)
"Once in a Lifetime: Investigating Z -> tau tau -> e mu (+neutrinos) at D0"
The sum of signed impact parameters in a two-track system is proposed as a tool for discriminating channels with lifetime in the final state. Z -> tau tau -> e mu is shown to be a realistic process for studying this effect and the current best method of signal selection is presented
: Todd Huffman, Oxford
"Why B Physics is Interesting, (with a CDF focus)"
We all are convinced that the Standard Model of particle interactions is not the last word in the theory of the fundamental forces of nature. There are many searches proposed and on-going to try to add data to the speculations of what lies beyond the Standard Model. I show that the study of B mesons is actually much more fascinating than the simple measurements of lifetimes and branching ratios. These particles probe some very basic questions about the nature of matter in the Universe and are already beginning to constrain the physics beyond the standard model. Using recent results from the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, I show how the search for physics at the TeV scale can take place at the GeV scale and why CDF is, at the moment, unique in it's capability for that search.
: Frank Close, Oxford
"Pentaquarks and tetraquarks: the end of the constituent quark model?"
: Giacomo Polesello, Pavia/CERN
"Discovery physics with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"
We give an overview of the potential of the ATLAS detector for the discovery of new particles at the LHC, based on the expected detector performance and on the proposed analysis strategies. A special emphasis is given to the signatures predicted by supersymmetric models.