• Question: Have you discovered anything this year?

    Asked by 779grte48 to Steve, Emma, Christian, Bose, Alice on 13 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Steve Marsden

      Steve Marsden answered on 13 Mar 2016:

      Not in 2016, but I have published a paper in the last 12 months. Research isn’t as fast paced as it’s depicted in films, so I’m afraid my results aren’t the most exciting.

      I work on the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider. There are a range of analyses being performed at the same time on the data collected. I was looking for a new particle, which would explain how gravity works at distances smaller than an atom. We really don’t have any understanding of gravity at such small distances, but we do have a large number of theories. My work ruled out a small number of these theories.

      This isn’t a big discovery, but it is a necessary step to furthering our understanding of gravity.

    • Photo: Benjamin Bose

      Benjamin Bose answered on 14 Mar 2016:

      Last year I did some work on the side. The project was on particle collisions near black holes. We found out that if there is a cloud of scalar particles (the famous Higgs particle is a scalar particle for example) around the black hole then particles which interact with the cloud will have a lower energy collision. Particles which don’t interact with the cloud will have the same energy of collision as though there were no cloud at all.

      It’s not fundamental work at all but I did enjoy doing the project because it was mostly theoretical work (pen and paper stuff) whereas my current project is mostly programming. It provided a good break from the computer 🙂

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