Thanks to a grant from the STFC's Education, Training and Careers Committee, which secured co-funding alongside the traditional SEPnet contribution, the V NExT PhD Workshop, to be held in Cosener's House on 8-11 June 2015, will be open to PhD students from across the UK.

A novel proposal for cold dark matter, with a surpringly small mass of only 100 eV and interacting remarkably strongly with normal matter, has been published in Nature Scientific Reports   (authors James Bateman,  Ian McHardy, Alex Merle, Tim Morris and Hendrik Ulbricht). The paper also represents a milestone for the history of the department: for the first time there has been a publication involving authors from all three groups in Physics and Astronomy.

University press release

World wide press coverage

Title: Neutrino mass and mixing: from theory to experiment

Authors: Stephen F King, Alexander Merle, Stefano Morisi, Yusuke Shimizu and Morimitsu Tanimoto
 
"I am pleased to inform you that your paper has been selected to appear in the New Journal of Physics "Highlights of 2014" collection. This collection is a special showcase of articles that have been chosen to represent the breadth of interest and excellence of the work published in the journal last year.  Please find attached a certificate which we hope you will print out for the wall of your office/laboratory or post to your website."
 
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/page/highlights-of-2014
 
 

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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:

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."