Professor Phil Allport, from the Department of Physics, has been elected Upgrade Coordinator of the 3,000 physicist strong ATLAS collaboration, a £200 million international programme, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Professor Allport is Coordinator of Research in the School of Physical Sciences, Director of the Liverpool Semiconductor Detector Centre, Head of the Particle Physics Group and Chair of the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics Group.
The UK is one of the biggest contributors to the LHC project. Through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which funds the UK particle physics programme, including the CERN subscription, the UK has contributed vital hardware, computing and scientific knowledge.
The ATLAS Experiment reproduces conditions in the Universe within a pico-second after the Big Bang, allowing searches for massive particles, such as the proposed Higgs Boson or Supersymmetric Particles. These are believed to account for how all fundamental particles came to have their masses and how the Universe came to have the properties we see today.
Click here for the full story on the ATLAS Experiment and the University’s involvement.