ATLAS is a general-purpose particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ATLAS is designed to exploit the full discovery potential of the LHC, pushing the frontiers of scientific knowledge. ATLAS' exploration uses precision measurement to push the frontiers of knowledge by seeking answers to fundamental questions such as: What are the basic building blocks of matter? What are the fundamental forces of nature? What is dark matter made of?
LHCb is a detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Its primary aim is to study differences between matter and antimatter (termed CP violation) in decays of beauty and charm hadrons . The level of CP violation provided by the Standard Model does not predict a large enough difference to explain why our universe is dominated by matter. LHCb aims to find new sources of CP violation that would be unambiguous signs of New Physics.
The direct detection of Dark Matter is one of the key scientific goals of modern physics. The Edinburgh Group, together with its UK and international colleagues, are members of the presently world-leading Large Underground Xenon (LUX) project, and of the future LUX-ZEPLIN project.
The observation of neutrino oscillations both solved the solar neutrino puzzle and opened up the possibility of CP violation in the neutrino sector. This will be searched for by the next generation of neutrino experiments in the coming decay which will also study proton decay and astrophysical neutrinos.
Advanced detector technologies underpin particle physics. The group is involved in developing cutting edge silicon pixel detectors for the ATLAS upgrade and studies of the latest generation of single photon detectors for future applications in flavour and neutrino physics.
The University of Edinburgh is one of the main participating institutes in the GridPP Collaboration. This allow individuals and organisations such as the LHC collaborations to access vast quantities of distributed computing resources for scientific research.