The University of Southampton

Published: 23 February 2015

Congratulations to Stefano Moretti and Elena Accomando who, thanks to their roles as theory consultants, appear as CoIs in a 148k£ successful bid to STFC for the 2-year project `The ILC as a Higgs factory'. This travel award will enable the UK community engaged in physics and detector studies for a future International Linear Collider (ILC) to re-establish its presence on the international stage in order to be eventually able to participate in a future ILC detector. The ILC is the most probable successor to the current Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the Higgs boson was found in 2012, which led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. The main scope of the ILC will be to study in great detail the properties of the Higgs boson and the machine may start operations as early as 2025, possibly in Japan.

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Published: 24 February 2015

Congratulations to Stefano Moretti for securing as PI a 330kEUR European grant (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014) that will enable the construction over the next four years of a collaborative network centred around Higgs physics research, called Non Minimal Higgs, yet incorporating sharing of knowledge and ideas from research to market (and vice-versa) for the advancement of science and the development of innovation. This will be achieved by promoting international and inter-sector collaboration through staff exchanges at all levels with partners in Finland (Helsinki), France (Paris), Portugal (Lisbon), Sweden (Uppsala), Canada (Carleton), Egypt (Cairo), Japan (Toyama), Morocco (Tangier) and USA (Santa Cruz).

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Published: 16 March 2015

James Drummond wins a €2M ERC consolidator grant, Integrable Structures in Quantum Field Theory, which will fund his salary, four postdoctoral positions and three PhD studentships over a period of 5 years. 

Quantum field theory forms the foundation of our understanding of elementary particle physics. It provides the theoretical background for the interpretation of data from collider experiments. While quantum field theory is an old subject, over the last decade new features have begun to emerge which reveal new ways to understand it. In particular an astonishing simplicity has been found at the heart of the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four spacetime dimensions, a close cousin of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), which describes the strong interactions.

My research team will use the new methods I have been developing to construct explicit results for scattering amplitudes and correlation functions. We will develop these results into general statements about the analytic behaviour of scattering amplitudes. The approach will be based on my recent work on new dualities between amplitudes and Wilson loops and on new symmetries revealing an underlying integrable structure. This research will allow us to answer key foundational questions such as the origin of Regge behaviour of scattering amplitudes in the high energy limit, and the connection to string theory in the limit of strong coupling. We will also pursue the connection to quantum groups and formulate the problem of scattering amplitudes in this language. This provide a solid mathematical underpinning to the formulation of the scattering problem in quantum field theories and allow application of techniques from the field of integrable systems to gauge theories. An enormous effort goes into performing the calculations of scattering amplitudes needed to make precise predictions for collider experiments. New techniques to handle such calculations are much needed. We will develop new tools, such as the application of differential equation methods for loop integrals and analytic bootstrap methods for amplitudes. This research will allow us to greatly improve on existing efforts to calculate processes in QCD.

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Published: 3 June 2015

Tim Morris wins a JSPS BRIDGE fellowship to spend the Autumn in Japan. The fellowship is awarded to give graduate lectures on the Exact Renormalization Group, participate in the Niigata-Yamagata workshop in November, make research visits to Kobe, Kanazawa, Nara, Kyushu, and Kyoto, and finally carry through research work with profs Itoh and Igarishi in Niigata.

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Published: 4 June 2015

Sasha Belyaev wins a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for academic year 2015-16 for the project "Collider and Cosmological exploration of minimal consistent Dark Matter models".

The project is aimed at developing a framework to explore complementarity of the LHC and and Direct Detection Dark Matter (DM) searches. It includes building the set of Minimal Consistent DM models, their implementation into respective tools, and exploration of complementarity of collider and non-collider DM searches. This project will be performed in close contact with members of CMS collaboration at the LHC.

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Published: 16 September 2015

SHEP's PhD student Tobias Tsang won a 500£ poster award at the "Fifth Annual DiRAC Science Day". Tobias' poster (you can download a copy here) presents his work on "Simulations of Heavy Quarks in lattice QCD" which he is carrying out with the local lattice QCD research group lead by Prof. Flynn, Dr. Juettner and Prof. Sachrajda in collaboration with researchers from Columbia Universtiy and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US and from the KEK research lab in Japan.

The posters' abstract:

Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics (LQCD) is a computational tool in particle physics that allows to provide insight into regimes where perturbative methods fail. Physicists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton, together with colleagues from the USA and Japan are using High Performance Computers to calculate the low energy properties of the Standard model in the strong sector such as masses, form factors and decay constants of hadrons. This work presents our study of the properties of mesons containing the charm (or bottom) quark with the aim to make predictions from first principles about their properties.

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Published: 6 October 2015

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2015 to Takaaki Kajita(Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, University of Tokyo, Japan) and to Arthur B. McDonald (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration, Canada) "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass" ... "for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe."

In 1998 Takaaki Kajita presented to the world the discovery that neutrinos produced in the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to Earth. Arthur McDonald subsequently led the canadian collaboration which demonstrated that neutrinos from the sun do not disappear on their way to Earth, but change identity by the time of arrival to the SNO detector.
Takaaki Kajita is collaborator and the scientist in charge of the Univ. of Tokyo node of our European ITN network "Invisibles: Neutrinos, Dark Matter and Dark Energy" (www.invisibles.eu), which has neutrino oscillations as one of its major research lines. This network is coordinated by the team of the Univ. Autónoma de Madrid and it includes 29 European and extra-EU nodes, which includes the BSM sub-group of SHEP in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton led by Professor Steve King and including also Dr. Pasquale Di Bari who are experts in neutrino physics.

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Published: 20 November 2015

Luigi delle Rose, from Universita' del Salento, has secured a grant from the Fondazione Angelo della Riccia in the form of a Post-doctoral Research Fellowship to join SHEP for about one year starting Jan/Feb 2016. His research will concern `U(1) models from the LHC to the unification scale' and will see him embedded within the NExT Institute, working with Prof Stefano Moretti, Dr Elena Accomando and Prof Claire H Shepherd-Themistocleous. Luigi will also continue his collaboration with Prof Kostas Skenderis under the auspices of the STAG centre.

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Published: 26 November 2015

The Southampton node of the European Innovative Training Network (ITN) Invisibles: Neutrinos, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which included the 2015 Nobel laureate Kajita san, will continue its involvement in this award-winning research with the recent announcement of two new major EU H2020 funding streams.
 
ELUSIVES is a €4m ITN network that aims to understand the nature of the most elusive particles which make up the universe, particularly neutrinos and dark matter particles, with SHEP providing expertise in neutrino theory, cosmology and CP violation.
 
InvisiblesPlus is a €2.5m RISE Network that will facilitate a worldwide network of internationally-recognised researchers including named researchers from SHEP's BSM, Collider and Lattice sub-groups as well as from Maths.
 
Together these networks, with Steve King leading both the Southampton nodes, will pick up from where the Invisibles network will finish in April 2016 and will run in parallel for four years, providing great opportunities for SHEP researchers.
 
For more information about Invisibles see http://www.invisibles.eu

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Published: 3 December 2015

Successful bids to GRADnet and the STFC's Education, Training and Careers Committee secured funding in order to run the VI NExT PhD Workshop, to be held in Sussex on 20-23 June 2016 and open to all UK students in both theory and experiment.

 

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