Consolidated Grant for the Centre for Particle Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London

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Experimental particle physics addresses some of the fundamentalquestions about the structure and behaviour of the Universe at thelevel of the smallest particles of matter, the quarks and the leptons,and the forces acting between them. We are exploring fundamentalproperties of particles at the the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) andalso exploring the nature of dark matter and neutrinos by developingand employing novel detection systems.We are contributing to the continued operation of the ATLAS project atthe Large Hadron Collider at CERN. We have constructed andcommissioned electronic systems and the software that drives them.From the beginning of data taking we have played a leading role insearches for exotic particles, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson,and studies of the properties of the heaviest particle discovered so far:the top quark. We are heavily invested in the upgrades to the ATLAS detector, which will allow for the collection of large datasets, capable of probing even more fundamental questions at the energy frontier. Although there is ample indirect evidence for the existence of darkmatter as inferred from its gravitational interactions, it has not yetbeen directly detected in terrestrial laboratories. Direct detectionexperiments seek to observe dark matter scattering on target detectornuclei. We explore these issues through a world-leading dark mattersearch with the Lux-Zeplin detector which uses liquid xenon and with the development of a large dark matter detector DarkSide-20k whichuses liquid argon. The group's expertise in high pressure TPCs is now beingutilised to carry out measurements relevant to the study of neutrinosas part of the DUNE and Hyper-K experiments.Using detection techniques similar to those of our dark matter research, we are also involved in the the puzzle surrounding the matter anti-matter asymmetry in the Universe bystudying the elusive neutrino particle. We measure CP violation in the lepton sectorusing the T2K long baseline neutrino experiment in Japan.Our expertise in accelerator science will allow us to carry outstudies for the machine-detector interface for the High Luminosity LHCand ILC. We will also expand the interactions between ourphenomenology group and the experimental Neutrino and Dark Matter communities.