Current Research Activities

I am a member of the Sussex EPP group and I currently work in the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. ATLAS is a multi-purpose detector that will look at the result of the collision of two counter-rotating beams of protons in the Large Hadron Collider at European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). The centre-of-mass energy of the two beams will be 14 TeV, the highest CM energy that has ever been reached in a particle physics collider. The LHC will recreate in a controlled environment the conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang, enabling us to answer to some of the fundamental questions of physics, like the origin of mass. I am interested in looking for evidence of Super-Symmetry, by looking for particular events with three leptons in the final state, where one or more of these is a Tau Lepton. I am also responsible for the ATLAS Trigger Event Data Model, to ensure that all the Trigger software components (the ATLAS 'brain') are developed in accordance to the very strict quality requirements of the ATLAS Experiment. I am also responsible to make sure that sofware that is developed to drive the various parts of the trigger is correctly integrated within the full ATLAS software. I am also interested in studying possible improvements of the ATLAS trigger for a future ATLAS upgrade.


Other interests

I am the Sussex Principal Investigator on the GridPP Collaboration. GridPP is a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the UK and CERN. They have built a distributed computing grid across the UK for particle physicists. At the moment there is a working grid across 17 UK institutions, including Sussex, helping to process the data from the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The UK Grid contributes the equivalent of almost 40,000 PCs to the worldwide LHC Computing Grid and the European Grid Infrastructure, both projects provide access to computing resources to over 20,000 researchers.

I am the Sussex Principla Investigator on the ILC/LC Collaboration. I have been working at the development and testing of calorimeter prototypes for future linear collider detectors as a member of the CALICE Collaboration. I have also been working in the BaBar Experiment, studying CP violation in the decay of B mesons produced in e+ e- collisions at the PEPII accelerator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In the same experiment I have also studied some of the properties of the Tau lepton, like it's decay probability to strange hadrons.