£3m awarded to University Particle Physics Experiment group

The Edinburgh Particle Physics Experiment group has been successful in obtaining combined funding of £3m from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). 

This award will support the group's work over the next 4 years for the ATLAS and LHCb experiments at CERN, the dark matter experiment Lux-Zeplin, and plans for a neutrino experiment (Hyper-Kamiokande) in Japan.

The activities of these major international experiments include research into the properties of the Higgs boson, the search for new particles beyond the standard model such as dark matter, and investigations into the difference between matter and antimatter in beauty hadrons and neutrinos.

"This is excellent news. The LHC successfully started operating again this year at almost twice the beam energy. Over the next few years, Edinburgh physicists  are looking forward to recording and analysing even larger data samples. We hope this will allow us to shed light on three of the major unsolved questions about how nature works, namely the origin of mass, dark matter and the asymmetry between matter and antimatter." Prof. Franz Muheim, head of the Particle Physics Experiment group at the University of Edinburgh

"This funding is welcome news for the Atlas experiment group in Edinburgh! By supporting our team of academics, researchers, engineer and technicians, we can take the next steps in investigating the Higgs boson particle, and in answering some outstanding mysteries of our universe, such as the existence of dark matter and how to incorporate the force of gravity into theories of quantum mechanics." Dr Victoria Martin, Particle Physics Experiment group