I am a STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow working on LHC physics with the ATLAS detector.
My research focuses on unravelling the foundations of the Standard Model of particle physics: the mechanism of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking (EWSB), from which the Higgs boson, that gives massive particles their mass, arises.
Using the data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, I study vector boson scattering (VBS), essentially using the LHC as a boson collider! I probe the scattering of two W bosons with the same electric charge. This process is so rare that it requried LHC Run-2 data to observe it in 2018.
VBS is an essential process to study because its production rate is directly affected by the Higgs boson (discovered in 2012), which is exchanged during the scattering process.
My current focus is on finding new ways to measure the polarisation of the W bosons to measure the rate at which two longitudinally polarised W bosons (the longitudinal polarisation of the W boson arises directly from EWSB) scatter. This is even rarer and happens only in about 1 out of 15-20 same-charge WW scattering events. It is essential to measure that rate as precisely as possible.
To enable these precision measurements in the future, I work on developing novel silicon detectors for the upgrade of ATLAS and experiments at future colliders. My research is on ultra-fast detectors that measure very precisely (at the level of tens of microns and picoseconds) the position and time-of-arrival of particles produced during the collisions. This helps us get a greater understanding of what is going on and improve the precision of our measurements. This work requires a lot of novel R&D to overcome the many challenges.