Discovering Particles

Exhibit team

Discovering particles: fundamental building blocks of the Universe was organised by researchers from the Elementary Particle Physics Group at the University of Birmingham and from the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, with help from a few friends. The members of the exhibit team were as follows:

Will Barter, Richard Bonella, Andy Chisholm, Harry Cliff, Jeremy Dickens, Daniel Elsby,
Maurice Goodrick, Karl Harrison, Bart Hommels, Cristina Lazzeroni, Chris Lester,
Roman Lietava, Karim Massri, Jimmy McCarthy, Vicki Moeller, Neasan O’Neill, Andy Parker,
Plamen Petrov, Rebecca Pitt, Tanya Sandoval, Xenakis Serghi, Mark Slater,
Orlando Villalobos-Baillie, Pete Watkins, Nigel Watson, Sarah Williams, John Wilson, Steve Wotton

The University of Birmingham and the University of Cambridge both have proud traditions in Particle Physics. The electron, proton and neutron were all discovered at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Europe’s first proton accelerator of synchrotron design, the design used for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was built and operated at the Nuffield Laboratory, University of Birmingham. In recent decades, Birmingham and Cambridge physicists have made key contributions to a number of large-scale international experiments that have produced landmark results. Highlights have included the discovery of the W and Z bosons, the determination of the number of light neutrino types, the unravelling of the structure of the proton, and high-precision measurements of matter-antimatter differences. Today, researchers from the two institutes are involved in three of the four main LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb. They’re also engaged in a wide spectrum of complementary activities. These include studies in non-LHC experiments, design of future accelerators, detector construction and testing, exploitation of distributed computing, and development of high-speed electronics.

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