Research Interests

My research interests are in experimental elementary (high-energy) particle physics. They are divided into three activities:

• Searches for new physcis using particles containing b-quarks using the ATLAS experiment, particles containing strange quarks in the NA62 exepriment, and neutrinos in the Legend collaboration.
• The investigation of the strong nuclear force, and the predictions of the theory describing that force, QCD
• The development of world-wide computing systems to serve the huge processing and storage requirements of particle physics and other science areas.

My ATLAS studies at the LHC involve the decays of particles that contain b-quarks that will allow us better to understand a rare violation of a symmetry known as CP. this is intimately connected with the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. These are also an ideal area to properly understand the behavior of the tracking detectors and software, which we need before we can properly apply the tracking in Higgs and SUSY searches. We are also investigating the use of b-events as a window into new 'flavour dependent' physics.

At LEP II, I investigated the strong interaction as a member of the ALEPH collaboration, and various measures of its strength. I look at the general shape, and flow of energy and momentum in events. I remain the convener of the LEP QCD Working Group and of its Annihilations subgroup. We attempt to combine experimental results at various energies to give clear evidence for the change of the strength of the strong interaction with increasing energy scale; we also try to provide a consistent treatment of theoretical uncertainties in these measurements. I also investigated strong interaction effects in the decays of W boson pairs, particularly a prediceted phenomenom called 'colour reconnection'.

In order to do all of this exciting physics, advanced software and a world-wide computing system is required. For ATLAS, I was until 2009 the chair of the International Computing Board and am part of the computing project leadership team. I continue to develop the ATLAS computing model. I run the UK component of the ATLAS offline computing and software project. At Lancaster, we are developing tracking tools for ATLAS and Grid software for the community.We provide a Grid computing farm as part of the NorthGrid Tier 2 (spread over Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield); I chair the NorthGrid Management Board. The Tier 2 is part of the GridPP collaboration, and I used to Co-ordinate the experiment applications development in GridPP and sit on the Project Management Board representing ATLAS and NorthGrid. I was a member of STFC's Computing Advisory Panel from 2009-2014 (and was previously on PPARC's Computing Advisory Panel from 2007-2009) and chair the Particle Physics Users Advisory Committee.

I was elected chair of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (wLCG) Collaboration Board in July 2009.

I became a member fo the STFC Particle Physics Advisory Panel in October 2015 and became its chair in 2019.

I joined the Institute of Physics Head of Department Forum Steering Committe in 2015 and took over as Chair in 2019.