Sussex EPP 2012 Consolidated Grant Supplement

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The Sussex Experimental Particle Physics group is involved in three strands of Particle Physics: the ATLAS experiment atCERN's Large Hadron Collider; the SNO+ neutrino experiment at SNOLAB in Canada; and the nEDM experiment at ILL inGrenoble, France. All three experiments probe some of the most fundamental properties of Nature and seek to findevidence for new physics phenomena.Sussex makes leading contributions to the analysis of ATLAS data, searching for evidence of supersymmetry in protonprotoninteractions where electrons, muons or taus are produced in the final state. The discovery of supersymmetry wouldprovide evidence for new physics as well as possibly a link between particle physics and cosmology, by uncovering thenature of the elusive Dark Matter in our universe. Sussex also makes important contribution to the ATLAS trigger system(which acts like the experiment's "brain") -- through participation in trigger operations and in the development andmaintenance core software for the trigger system. The group is also involved in preparations for future upgrades of theATLAS trigger system.Sussex provides substantial intellectual leadership in the ongoing search for an electric dipole moment (EDM) of theneutron. Finding an EDM would represent unambiguous evidence for physics beyond the SM; conversely, the absence ofany EDM, at the sensitivity for which we are aiming, would provide extremely severe constraints on models of new physics.This work also provides a link to cosmology, since the size of any neutron EDM is determined by the same CP-violatingmechanism that underlies the dominance of matter over antimatter in the Universe.Sussex plays a crucial role in the SNO+ experiment, where it leads the calibration and the dataflow activities. The group isalso becoming involved in the crucial neutrinoless double-beta decay analysis, which could both determine the mass of theneutrino and answer the long-standing question of whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle.Group members are also becoming involved, at a smaller level, in new experiments for direct Dark Matter searches.