Exploring The Energy Ladder of the Universe (30 May - 10 June) 

Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics (MITP)
Workshop organised by SHEP members (P.Di Bari - S. King) with Q. Shafi (Un. Delaware)

Deadline for applications 31 January 2016

A successful 2-day student-led conference, "Supersymmetry from M-Theory to the LHC" took place at the University of Kent from 11 to 12 Jan 2016, sponsored by SEPnet (South East Physics Network) for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the UK.

The workshop was proposed and organised by Maien Binjonaid and Marc Thomas from the SHEP (Southampton High Energy Physics) group, Chris Harman from the University of Sussex, and Russell Kirk from Royal Holloway London, with advice from Professor Stefano Moretti.

The workshop had 30 participants, 75% of whom were from SEPnet affiliated institutes and there were 4 invited keynote speakers: Professors Steven Abel (Durham), Alan Barr (Oxford), Steve King (Southampton), and John Ellis (King's College) who kindly provided overview talks on Supersymmetry Theory, Experiment, Model Building, and Phenomenology.

10 talks were presented, mainly by PhD students. The talks were divided into three sessions: Theory, Experiment, and Phenomenology.

Congratulations to Southampton PhD student Maria Dimou, who won the best poster prize out of the 6 posters presented.

A summary of the conference, along with downloadable PDF files of the presentations can be found on:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/450634/

And the SEPnet webpage can be accessed via the VRE at: http://www.open.ac.uk/students/research/sepnet/supersymmetry-m-theory-lhc-10-12-january-2016

SHEP member Luigi delle Rose has won a 2-year post-doctoral Rutherford International Fellowship, sponsored by STFC and the European Commission under Horizon 2020, through the Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND scheme. This award is to carry out research within the NExT Institute, with base in RAL-PPD and Southampton, continuing to work on the theme `U(1) models from the LHC to the unification scale' with Prof Stefano Moretti, Dr Elena Accomando and Prof Claire H Shepherd-Themistocleous, with the specific intent of testing such scenarios within the CMS experiment.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Tetsuo Shindou, from Kogakuin University (Tokyo, Japan), will spend two months of his sabbatical (February and March 2017) within the NExT Institute, with base in Southampton and attachment to RAL, to work with Prof Stefano Moretti and Prof Claire H Shepherd-Themistocleous on non-minimal Higgs searches at the LHC.

Dr Alexander Pukhov, from Skobeltcyn Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has already started his tenure of this prestigious award to work in collaboration with Prof Alexander Belyaev on CalcHEP and mircOMEGas. See here for further details.

A Talk by Professor Laurent Lellouch of the National Center for Scientific Research, (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University, France.

The origin of mass is mysterious. In our everyday experience, the mass of an object is the sum of the mass of its parts. However, in the world of subatomic particles such as quarks and gluons, this everyday assumption is no longer true and even very small mass differences can have cosmic consequences. After an introduction to the subatomic world and the mechanisms by which mass emerges, I will describe how supercomputers are being used to compute from first principles the interactions between elementary particles in order to reveal the origins of mass and to explain the stability of the matter which constitutes us and the visible universe.

When: Monday, 25 July 2016 from 19:00 to 20:00 (BST)
Where: Lecture Theatre 1067, Building 58, University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ
For directions please go to: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/about/visit/highfield-campus.page

Please sign up via Eventbrite (http://latticeqcd.eventbrite.co.uk) to let us know you are coming.

SHEP PhD students win GRADnet Entrepreneurship Challenge

Four PhD students from the Southampton High Energy Physics group at the University of Southampton: Azaria Coupe, Andrew Lawson, Anthony Preston and Marc Scott, won the GRADnet Entrepreneurship in Action challenge on Wednesday 13th July. SEPnet institutions were invited to form teams of postgraduate researchers to compete in the challenge: each team was tasked with creating a novel business idea, which was then to be pitched to a panel of judges made up of entrepreneurs and business experts. The judges were impressed by the Southampton team's idea of a mobile app designed to teach people how to play musical instruments, citing in particular their understanding of the target market and existing competition, and were confident in the ability of the team to make their idea a reality.

See also: http://www.sepnet.ac.uk/gradnet-entrepreneurship-challenge-winners-announced/

Dr Amit Chakraborty from the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (Mumbai, India) wins a two-year post-doctoral Newton International Fellowship from The Royal Society (London, UK) for the project `Study of the CP-violating MSSM at the 13 and 14 TeV runs of the LHC' to join SHEP and NExT with Prof. Stefano Moretti as host scientist.

Mr Sebastian Rosado Navarro from the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) (Puebla, Mexico) will be visiting the NExT Institute over a twelve month period during the academic years 2016/17 and 2017/18 to work with Prof Moretti on `Non-Minimal Higgs Models'.

Successful bids, led by Drs Accomando and Di Bari, to GRADnet/SEPnet and the Education, Training and Careers Committee of STFC have secured funding in order to run the VII NExT PhD Workshop, to be held in Abingdon on 26-29 June 2017 and open to all UK students in both theory and experiment with an emphasis on gender balance. This year edition will feature a formal connection with the Scottish University Physics Alliance (SUPA), as Dr David J Miller (Glasgow) is part of the Orgainising Committee. Further information is found on the on the NExT webpages.