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Dr Alex Finch

Research Officer

Alex Finch

Lancaster University

Physics Building

LA1 4YB

Lancaster

Tel: +44 1524 593618

Research overview

My research effort is currently solely within the topic of long baseline neutrino experiments. I am a a member of the  T2K collaboration  for which I wrote and continue to develop the event display software. This produces pictures of the interactions in the detector and is a vital tool for the collaboration from checking the data when it is first collected, through developing reconstruction algorithms, and finally analysing the physics results. I am  convenor of the software group and take care of maintaining much of the documentation for  the software. I am also working on a proposed succesor to T2K known as HyperK which can be simply summarised as T2K on steroids. If it is approved then it will be built in a few years time.

For most of my career before moving to T2K my main research interest has been the field of photon photon collisions. The photon is a fundamental particle of the `Standard Model' of matter so by studying its interactions we are able to study many aspects of the model, but in particular the strong force which binds atomic nuclei together.

For many years my research took place as part of the ALEPH collaboration at CERN using the electron positron collider. This was the original accelerator to occupy the tunnel now used by the LHC. I recently measured the rate at which two colliding photons produce a final state containing b quarks using techniques for identifying b quarks that had not previously been used for data of this type.

In addition to my research work I help  to teach  C++ programming in the department.

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