Professor Fabrizio Caola, Associate Professor of Theoretical Particle Physics in the Department of Physics and our Tutorial Fellow in Physics, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator Grant. Professor Caola's ERC research project aims to develop a new generation of theoretical predictions for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to unlock new insights from its data.
The LHC at CERN is producing incredibly precise data, which allow us to study the structure of the fundamental interactions that govern our universe in a regime never explored before. About ten years ago, the LHC already achieved its first milestone by discovering the Higgs boson, a key missing piece of the Standard Model of particle theory. More recently, LHC data demonstrated that the Higgs boson seems indeed to interact with matter through Yukawa interactions, a phenomenon not observed at the fundamental level previously.
Dr Caola and his team will develop innovative techniques for calculating scattering amplitudes and new ways for dealing with the intricate patterns of particle radiation which currently prevent accurate theoretical predictions for all but a handful of very simple collider processes.
The application process for ERC Starting Grants is highly competitive: this year, around 14.5% of applications were successful out of a total of 2130 submitted proposals. ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded up to €2 million for a period of 5 years.
Many congratulations to Professor Fabrizio!