Physicist Wins Prize for Work at CERN

Experimental particle physicist Dr Chris Parkes has received the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics Group prize in recognition of his work at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

He has been involved in a number of experiments being conducted at CERN, including DELPHI (Detector for Lepton, Photon and Hadron Identification) which operated in the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, now the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and is currently leader of the LHC ‘beauty experiment’ (LHCb) Vertex Locator (VELO) software group, writing the first code through to the final commissioning of the software. The VELO is the detector closest to the collisions at the LHC and its role is to observe short-lived particles containing beauty quarks, called B-mesons.

Dr Parkes said: “My main research activity involves studying the difference in behaviour between matter and anti-matter in the decays of B-mesons, and to develop detectors to make this study possible. These B-meson studies allow a search for physics beyond the Standard Model to be performed. It’s a great honour to have received this award, and it is a testament to all the work being performed by my colleagues on the LHC experiments in the Glasgow group.”