Luigi delle Rose, from Universita' del Salento,ÃÂ 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.
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. àELUSIVES is a ââ¬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. àInvisiblesPlus is a ââ¬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. àTogether 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. àFor more information about Invisibles see http://www.invisibles.eu
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.