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EXPERIMENTS

Yes

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No

​The department, in collaboration with colleagues from UK Universities, is involved in many high energy physics (HEP) projects and running experiments located at different research institutes around the world.​​

NEUTRINO EXPERIMENTS

Detectors designed to study neutrinos, particles that interact only via the weak force and gravity with other particles of matter. Neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a significant number of neutrinos and are often built underground, to isolate them from cosmic rays ​and other background radiation​
  • HYPER-KAMIOKANDE
    Hyper-Kamiokande is a next-generation neutrino-research project built to investigate a wider range neutrino properties with unprecedented precision, from the analysis of neutrino oscillations (CP violation) to further development of neutrino astronomy
  • T2K
    T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. It investigates how muon neutrinos change from one flavour to another as they travel 295 km across Japan

DARK MATTER EXPERIMENTS

Experiments designed to try to detect dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the Universe which doesn't interact via the electromagnetic force and is therefore difficult to detect​​​. ​
  • LUX/LZ DETECTORS
    Noble liquid detectors, especially those based on liquid argon and liquid xenon, are used in many frontier dark matter searches, such as LUX/LZ, providing excellent event reconstruction and discrimination capabilities
  • MIGDAL EXPERIMENT
    ​A new desktop fusion devices installed at ISIS, across the road from the RAL Particle Physics Department, could lead to a breakthrough in the direct detection of dark matter measuring the Migdal effect
  • QUEST-DMC
    QUEST-DMC uses novel quantum technology to explore previously inaccessible parameter space, searching for dark matter candidates on the order of mass of a proton.

CERN

​​​CERN ​runs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world. ​Find out more about UK involvement with CERN here.​
  • ATLAS
    ATLAS is a large general-purpose particle physics experiment. It is designed to study the fundamental constituents of matter, searching for new processes and particles that could change our understanding of energy and mass
  • CMS
    The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with a physics programme ranging from studying the Standard Model to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter
  • LHCb
    LHCb is one of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN with the purpose to study CP violation and investigate rare decays of beauty and charm quarks​

FUTURE EXPERIMENTS

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  • AION
    AION is the UK's first large-scale atom interferometer, designed to investigate ultra-light dark matter and mid-frequency gravitational waves using quantum interference techniques.
  • DarkSide-20K
    DarkSide-20K is a dark matter detector under construction at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory. It will continue the work of its predesscor, DarkSide-50, imposing world-leading constraints on dark matter models.
  • DUNE
    DUNE is a liquid argon neutrino oscillation experiments located in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). It has a wide physics program, but one of the main aims is to investigate, if neutrinos and antineutrinos behave the same
  • ELECTRON-ION COLLIDER (EIC)
    The EIC will be a particle accelerator that collides electrons with protons and nuclei. The electron beam will reveal the arrangement of the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of nuclei, allowing us to study the strong nuclear force
  • LhARA
    LhARA, the Laser-hybrid Accelerator for Radiobiological Applications, will harness the features of a laser accelerator with strong-focusing and rapid acceleration techniques to allow biology studies and cancer particle beam therapy to be performed
  • MUON COLLIDER
    A Muon Collider is a proposed particle accelerator facility in its conceptual design stage that collides muon beams for precision studies of the Standard Model and for direct searches of new physics
  • nuSTORM
    The nuSTORM facility will provide νe and νµ beams from the decay of low-energy muons confined within a storage ring. The instrumentation, combined with the knowledge of muon decay, will make it possible to determine the neutrino flux at the %-level

PAST COLLABORATIONS

  • BaBar
    The BaBar high energy physics experiment was based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California USA.
  • Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE)
    Completing its running in 2017, MICE established the feasibility of muon accelerators to unlock nature's secrets hidden in the properties of the neutrino.