LHC researcher Antonella De Santo becomes Sussex’s first female professor in physics

Antonella De Santo, who heads the Sussex team that contributed to one of the biggest ever discoveries in physics, has become the first woman physicist to be made a professor at Sussex.

Professor De Santo, who is Head of Experimental Particle Physics, was responsible for setting up the Sussex group for the ATLAS experiment – part of the huge international science collaboration that last year discovered the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence underpins scientific understanding of how our Universe was formed and evolved – at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland.

Professor De Santo was educated in Italy and worked at CERN, the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London before coming to Sussex to develop the collaboration with CERN.

“Working on the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs boson was a life-changing experience and I feel very privileged to be in a generation of physicists who have witnessed this change in what we know about nature and the Universe,” says Professor De Santo.

Around half of physics departments in UK universities still have no women professors, so is it isolating to be one of the few? Professor De Santo says: “It’s not always that easy to socialise with other women researchers, especially given that there are relatively few of them – it would be good to see more. But what matters in physics is your work, what you’re doing, not your gender, so I’m never isolated.”

Inspired herself by a female role model – the former head of ATLAS, Fabiola Gianotti – Professor De Santo is in turn looking to inspire the next generation of scientists and to encourage girls not to think of physics as a boys-only subject.

The public’s reaction to the ATLAS team’s Higgs boson stand at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition earlier this month was encouraging. “We had 7,000 visitors at our stand in a week – it was fantastic to see so much interest, especially from young people,” says Professor De Santo.

The University’s widening participation strategy already includes visits and events aimed at encouraging schoolchildren to look at science subjects and Professor De Santo is happy to be involved.

She says: “One teacher who heard I wanted to study physics said I’d be better off getting married and becoming a teacher. If I had listened to him I would never have had this wonderful experience. My advice to any young woman considering a physics degree, or a career in science would be – do not let anyone tell you that science is not for you. If that’s your dream, don’t ever let go of it.”

Professor Peter Coles, Head of the School of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS), congratulated Professor De Santo on her professorship in his blog, where he commented on a reluctance among women scientists to put themselves forward for promotion.

He said: “I hope that recent successes in MPS, such as Antonella’s Professorship and Readerships for astronomer Kathy Romer and mathematician Vanessa Styles, will provide the necessary encouragement.”

In April, Sussex received the bronze award of the UK-wide Athena SWAN Charter for its commitment to improving the career prospects of women working in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) subjects. The University is now continuing with its plans to achieve the silver award.

Physicists celebrate first anniversary of discovery of the Higgs boson

Physicists from the University of Sussex working on the Large Hadron Collider project took part in a major exhibition at the Royal Society in London from Tuesday (2 July) until Sunday (7 July) to celebrate the first anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson – the so-called ‘God particle’.

The Sussex team joined other UK scientists involved in the global project to demonstrate and talk about their role in what is regarded as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of modern times.

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an international project based in the CERN laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, was designed to help find answers to some of the biggest questions in particle physics by recreating conditions that existed in our Universe immediately after its formation at the time of the Big Bang.

The team at Sussex, led by Dr Antonella De Santo and Dr Fabrizio Salvatore, are involved in the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, an experiment that involves powerful beams of particles called protons being accelerated around the LHC’s 27km of underground tunnel, then crashing them together head-on at very high energies. In examining the products of these collisions, physicists expect to see major advances in their understanding of our Universe.

On 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at the LHC announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, named after British scientist Peter Higgs. This result marks a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the Universe.

For the Royal Society exhibition, the Sussex group examined an interactive poster produced at Sussex that showed, with the aid of coloured lights, how different types of particles move and interact in the ATLAS detector.

They also talked about the group’s specific contribution, which involves searching for Supersymmetry (which predicts the existence “partners” of known particles, which have so far eluded detection). The team also contributes to the ATLAS trigger system, the experiment’s “brain” that must decide which data to keep for further analysis.

Dr Fabrizio Salvatore

Says Dr. Fabrizio Salvatore "The Royal Society Science Exhibition was a real success. More than 12.000 people visited the exhibition in 7 days, and an estimate of more than 7000 visited the 'Understanding the Higgs Boson' stand, that the Sussex EPP group working on ATLAS has helped to organise and run during the whole of last week. Many thanks to all of them (Nicky Santoyo, Yusufu Shehu, Tina Potter, Stewart Martin-Haugh, Valeria Bartsch and Fabrizio Salvatore) !"

Dr Winfried Hensinger gives TEDx talk about the rise of quantum technology

Dr Winfried Hensinger, a Reader in Quantum, Atomic and Optical Physics, gave a TEDx talk at Sussex University about the future of quantum computers and the role the team he is part of, the Ion Quantum Technology Group at Sussex University, plays as they develop large scale quantum computers using charged atoms cooled to incredibly low temperaturesTEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship for student Robert Bennett

Robert Bennett, who will graduate this summer, has already been successful with postdoctoral job applications. He has been awarded the EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship at Leeds University. The title of his proposed research project 'Quantum Electrodynamics for Nanoscale Devices', will run for two years.

Record number of physics students for International Summer School

The new physics teaching lab is used for experiments in classical physics and electronics.

The International Summer School has begun and will run for 8 weeks.The department of physics is hosting 277 students from the US on the Introductory Physics courses, who will be in the new labs for the first time. Dr Lesley Onuora is directing this major operation, which has 4 members of faculty and 28 undergraduate teaching assistants, getting valuable teaching experience in workshops and labs.

Upgrade of the ATLAS High-level Trigger system

Investigators Dr Antonella De Santo (PI) and Dr Fabrizio Salvatore (Co-I) have been awarded a £111k grant to work on the Upgrade of the ATLAS High-Level Trigger system. Researcher Mark Sutton, a key member of the ATLAS team at Sussex, is supported on this grant.

The ATLAS trigger system can very much be seen as the experiment's "brain". In its current form, the ATLAS trigger has to process 40 million separate proton-proton collisions (or "events") every second, with the aim to reduce the number of events to be written to disk to about 200 per second. Only a handful of these events will contain exciting new physics (for example, only around five events every minute might contain a Higgs boson). Therefore it is crucial that the ATLAS trigger is able to process all events in real time, to make sure that all the interesting ones are saved to permanent storage for further analysis.

The ATLAS Trigger reconstructs events in three stages. The second and third stage of the ATLAS trigger, collectively known as High-Level Trigger (HLT), perform very fast reconstruction of particle trajectories in the detector, by running specialised algorithms on a farm of over 1000 PCs (see XPU image). Sussex has significant involvement in the ATLAS HLT, and in particular in the crucial reconstruction of particle "tracks" in the innermost part of the ATLAS detector.

Over the next decade, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is scheduled to undergo a phased programme of upgrades, to reach higher energies and much higher beam intensity than what has been achieved to date. This upgrade programme will enable ATLAS to collect unprecedented large samples of new data, at record-breaking high energies, and therefore to deliver an exciting new physics programme for many years to come. In parallel with the accelerator upgrades, the ATLAS detector, including the ATLAS trigger, will also undergo a phased