Particle Physics Group

Welcome to the Birmingham Particle Physics Group homepage. We are a large research group within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, investigating the ultimate structure of matter and the forces of nature. You can find lots of information on who we are, our activities and opportunities from the menu at the top and the news feed below. The group's history stretches back to the 1950s and the bubble chamber era. More recently, it includes the W and Z boson discoveries at the UA1 experiment, precision measurements in the electroweak sector at OPAL and detailed mapping of the proton structure at H1. There's a collection of group photographs taken over the years here.

Our main current activities are based at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. We have a central involvement in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, where we are characterising the recently discovered Higgs boson in multiple ways, investigating top quark and multi-boson signatures and studying processes in which one or both of the protons remains intact. We are testing lepton universality and investigating subtle effects in rare baryon decays at the LHCb experiment. We have senior leadership roles in the NA62 experiment, where we are making measurements of ultra-rare decays of strange particles to search for new physics effects in quantum loops. We have a fast-growing involvement in direct searches for dark matter, both through preparations for WIMP searches at the 50 tonne liquid argon Darkside-20k experiment and through the novel application of spherical proportional counters with NEWS-G. Our interests in a wide range of possible future ep, e⁺e⁻ and pp collider facilities are helping to shape the future of the field for the coming decades. Most immediately, in collaboration with the Nuclear Physics group, we are working towards the US Electron Ion Collider, which will begin probing the structure of matter in the early 2030s.

Our local facilities include a 200 m² set of clean rooms comprising the BILPA laboratory for silicon detector development and construction. As well as playing a major role in the upgrade programme of the ATLAS experiment for the high luminosity phase of the LHC, the BILPA is performing R&D into next-generation sensors and technology-transfer into instrumentation for hadron therapy. We also have extensive capabilities for the design, construction and firmware programming of state-of-the-art trigger and data acquisition systems and host a substantial GridPP site as part of the world-wide LHC distributed computing network. The group has a wide-ranging and innovative public engagement programme and supports particle physics education within schools. Please do contact us if you are interested! Our research is supported primarily by the Science and Technology Facilities Council with additional current grants from the Royal Society and the European Research Council.