Experimental Particle Physics

Experimental Particle Physics (EPP) probes the fundamental structure of matter. Through large collaborations of thousands of people across dozens of countries, we construct accelerators that collide particles together at very high energies, and build sophisticated detectors to track and understand particle events, allowing us to investigate the nature of the universe.

Our group works in a range of areas including:

• High Energy Physics
  • ATLAS at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  • Belle at KEK, Tsukuba Japan
  • Grid Computing
  • Detector Physics Lectures
• Detector Physics
  • The Pilatus detector at PSI, Switzerland
  • The Australian Synchrotron, Melbourne, Australia
  • Positron Emission Tomography, Austin Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria
    

  Recent News!

  February 2008

  Catalyst will be screening a piece on the LHC featuring us on Thursday Feb 28th, ABC, 8:00pm. Make sure to check it out!

  February 2008

  Welcome to our new honours students, Chiara, Shane and Denis!

  January 18 2008

  Dave's paper, 'Real Time Fill Pattern Measurement at the Australian Synchrotron' has been accepted for pubication in NIM A! Congratulations Dave! His will be the first paper published from the Australian Synchrotron.

  August 2007

  Congratulations to Phill who has passed his PhD! Phill will soon be beginning a postdoc position at University of Geneva.

  March, 2007

  Congratulations Tom and Jeremy who've passed their PhDs! Tom will be visiting us from 5th -12th April.

  Feb 19, 2007

  EPP in the TheAge Newspaper

  See "When Subatomic Particles Collide" in Monday, February 19th Education Age. The article describes the search for the Higgs boson and Physics Beyond the Standard Model at CERN. The reporter talks to Marco La Rosa, Anthony Morley and Markus Bischofberger.

  Feb 1, 2007

  Dr Graeme Stewart, Technical Coordinator for the ScotGrid Distributed Tier 2, presented a talk entitled "Storage and Data Management in EGEE" at AusGrid07 today. In this talk he discusses the different storage technologies in use throughout the EGEE / WLCG Grid, the File Transfer Service (FTS) and the LCG File Catalogue (LFC). He concludes with an overview of how the ATLAS Virtual Organisation uses these technologies in it's Distributed Data Management System (DDM), Don Quixote 2 (DQ2).

  You can find his paper here, and the AusGrid07 presentation here. Well worth a read!

  Dec 3-8, 2006

  Many of the group attended the 2006 AIP RiverPhys conference in Brisbane presenting talks and posters. Congratulations to Anna who won the award for best NUPP student talk!
  • Jared Winton (Talk) - Pilatus a new approach to Protein Crystallography
  • Anthony Morley (Talk) - Software alignment of complex tracking detectors
  • Jeremy Dalseno (Talk) - Measurement of the branching fraction and time-dependent CP violation parameters in B0 --> D*+ D*- KS Decays
  • Prof. Geoff Taylor (Talk) - Physics with the ATLAS Experiment in the Large Hadron Collider Era
  • Nadia Davidson (Talk) - Hadronic In Situ Calibration of the ATLAS detector
  • Bryn Sobott (Talk) - Charge collection characterization of PILATUS II pixel array
  • Phill Urquijo (Talk) - Determination of the CKM parameter Vcb and the b quark mass at Belle
  • Robin Wedd (Talk) - Rare Radiative B Meson decays at The Belle Detector
  • Markus Bischofberger (Talk) - A search for the SUSY Higgs in the decay H/A->tau+tau at the ATLAS experiment
  • Dr Glenn Moloney (Talk) - A global computing grid for analysis of data in the era of the large hadron collider
  • Anna Phan (Talk and Poster) - Detection of a light top squark with ATLAS
  • Will Davey (Poster) - Track Fitting in ATLAS: Improved Electron Tracking in the ATLAS Inner Detector
  • Suzie Sheehy (Poster) - Lepton flavour violating decays in the ATLAS detector
  • Vivien Lee (Poster) - Motion blur in PET imaging

  Nov 15-17, 2006

  Stefano Frixione (INFN, Genova, Italy and CERN, Geneva, Switzerland), recently visited us in Melbourne and presented a series of seminars on QCD. Thank you Stefano! QCD: are we ready for the LHC? Frixione_qcd.pdf

  Old News

  • Joint Workshop on Vub and Vcb at the B factories, University of Melbourne Jan 28-29 2006 Workshop page
  • Moments of the Electron Energy Spectrum in B->Xclnu decays at Belle: Paper contributed to EPS05
    BELLE-CONF-0558.ps.gz
  • Moments of the Electron Energy Spectrum in Semileptonic B Decays at Belle: Paper submitted to ICHEP04
    ichep2004_bc0474.ps.gz
  • Evidence of B⁰ to ρ⁰ π⁰: To appear in Physical Review Letters
    rho0pi0_prep.ps.gz
  • Extraction of the b-quark Fermi motion shape function parameters using the Belle B->X_s g photon energy spectrum:
    "Needed for improved measurements of the mysterious CKM matrix element V_ub" 0407052.ps.gz
  • ` Mystery Meson: Stretches the Laws of Particle Physics':
    Craig Everton's article on the X(3872) particle is in the April 2004 edition of Australasian Science

  • Mystery particle may hold clues to universe: [9 January, 2004] Our involvement in the discovery of the X(3872) meson was published in Melbourne University UniNews. This article was mentioned in Innovations Report and EurekAlert!.
  • New Physics from the Belle Experiment: [13 August, 2003] Belle has a new measurement of CP violation from the decay of the B meson to a Φ and K_S. More information.
  • Measurement of V_ub:Measurement of inclusive charmless semileptonic B decays at the endpoint of the electron momentum spectrum:
    belle-conf-0325.ps.gz
  • Studies of B⁰ to ρ⁺ π^- and Evidence of B⁰ to ρ⁰ π⁰:
    belle-conf-0318.ps.gz
  • 5-Quark State: In the invariant mass plot of n + K⁺ there is a substantial (5-sigma) peak at 1.54 GeV for a 5-quark state of matter. Some information on the result can be found here and the PRL paper here.
  • The visit of Gary Nairn MP, to CERN is mentioneded in the CERN Courier. Stuart Tovey accompanied him on his tour of the Australian Atlas contribution.
  • The ATLAS cavern makes the BBC news!! [11th June, 2003] ``Huge hole to hunt cosmic secrets''