Nuclear and Particle Physics
The Nuclear and Particle Physics Group undertakes research across all aspects of subatomic physics, from experimental and theoretical particle physics (including dark matter) to theoretical work in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), nuclear structure, and neutron stars.
Our staff and students are involved in international collaborations such as the Large Hadron Collider (especially the ATLAS and Belle II experiments) and in cutting-edge research in areas such as effective field theories and QCD, amongst others. Investigating the true nature of dark matter also is part of the work being done here.
The Group enjoys strong national and international links with other theory groups and experimentalists at major laboratories such as CERN (Switzerland), Jefferson Lab (USA), and J-PAC and KEK (Japan). We have a long history of seminars and colloquia involving staff, students and- when possible- overseas researchers. Many students have gone on to significant positions in institutions across the world, and there is a vibrant student community.
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Academic staff
Name Position/Title Research interests Area Publications A/Prof. Gary Hill CI CDMPP Dark matter direct detection CDMPP InspireHEP Prof. Paul Jackson CI CDMPP Experimental collider physics HEP, CDMPP InspireHEP Prof. Derek Leinweber Associate Director CSSM QCD CSSM InspireHEP Prof. Anthony Thomas AC FAA Director CSSM, CI CDMPP CSSM, HEP, CDMPP InspireHEP Prof. Martin White CI CDMPP Particle physics HEP, CDMPP InspireHEP Prof. Anthony Williams Associate Director CSSM, Deputy Director CDMPP CSSM, CDMPP, HEP InspireHEP A/Prof. Ross Young QCD CSSM, HEP InspireHEP A/Prof. James Zanotti QCD CSSM InspireHEP -
Research fellows
Name Research interests Area Publications Dr. Irene Bolognino Dark matter / SABRE CDMPP InspireHEP Dr. Utku Can QCD CSSM InspireHEP Dr. Waseem Kamleh QCD CSSM InspireHEP Dr. Ayse Kizilersu QCD/QED CSSM InspireHEP Dr. Max Lohe Theory CSSM InspireHEP Dr. Harish Potti Dark matter CDMPP InspireHEP Dr. Dipan Sengupta Dark matter CDMPP InspireHEP Dr. Xuan-Gong Wang Dark matter CDMPP InspireHEP -
Students
Name Level Supervisor/s Area Publications PhD Curtis Abell PhD Thomas/Leinweber CSSM InspireHEP Mischa Batelan PhD Zanotti/Young CSSM Joshua Crawford PhD Zanotti/Young CSSM Shanette De La Motte PhD Jackson/Young InspireHEP Matthew Fewell PhD Jackson/White CDMPP Emily Filmer PhD Jackson/White CDMPP InspireHEP Phil Grace PhD Jackson/White CDMPP InspireHEP Charles Grant PhD Jackson/White CDMPP Alec Hannaford-Gunn PhD Young/Zanotti CSSM InspireHEP Minh Tan Ha PhD Hill/Jackson CDMPP Liam Hockley PhD Thomas/Leinweber CSSM Tomas Howson PhD Young/Zanotti CSSM InspireHEP Nicholas Hunt-Smith PhD Thomas/White CDMPP InspireHEP Wasif Husain PhD Thomas/Leinweber CDMPP InspireHEP Thomas Kabelitz PhD Leinweber/Kamleh CSSM Albert Kong PhD Jackson/White CDMPP InspireHEP Jesper Leong PhD Thomas/Leinweber CSSM InspireHEP Bill Loizos PhD Williams/Wang CDMPP Melissa McIntyre PhD Kizilersu/Thomas CSSM Shiryu Owa PhD Thomas/Leinweber CSSM InspireHEP Hitarthi Pandya PhD Jackson/White CDMPP Skye Platten PhD Williams/Leinweber CSSM Tristan Ruggeri PhD Jackson/White CDMPP InspireHEP Rose Smail PhD Young/Zanotti CSSM Edmund Ting PhD White/Jackson CDMPP InspireHEP Adam Virgilli PhD Kamleh/Leinweber CSSM InspireHEP Bradley Wegener PhD Young/Zanotti CSSM Wanli Xing PhD Thomas/Leinweber CSSM MPhil Max Amerl MPhil Jackson/Hill CDMPP InspireHEP Nathaniel Botton MPhil Thomas CSSM Meera Deshpande MPhil Williams/White CDMPP Joshua Gill MPhil Williams/Sengupta CDMPP Nabil Humphrey MPhil Zanotti/Young CSSM InspireHEP Joseph Pritchard MPhil Thomas/Kizilersu CSSM Alex Woodcock MPhil Williams/White CDMPP InspireHEP Honours Jackson Mickley Hons Leinweber CSSM James Gallagher Hons Jackson CDMPP Matthew Green Hons Jackson/White CDMPP Cameron Harris Hons Jackson CDMPP Judith Kull Hons Jackson CDMPP -
Support staff
Name Role Sharon Johnson Personal assistant Dr. Padric McGee Research support Ramona Rogers Systems admin. Silvana Santucci Office administrator -
HEP Computing Cluster
The High-Energy Physics (HEP) computing cluster at the University of Adelaide is available for researchers in the ARC Special Research Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter (CSSM), High-Energy Physics (HEP) group and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics (CDMPP). Requests for student accounts should be directed to supervisors.
The cluster consists of a number of loosely-coupled computers which can be used to run jobs. Five AMD Ryzen-based systems are managed by the Slurm queuing system, with an additional Ryzen used for manually-managed jobs. A further six Intel Xeon computers are available for ad hoc jobs, software development, and debugging. A high-performance Hewlett Packard node is included for specialised work which requires high core counts and a large amount of memory.
All systems provide a common software environment which includes CVMFS, python, OpenMPI, and CUDA. Through CVMFS, a large number of software packages can be accessed, including ROOT, Geant4, various compiler environments, and many versions of python. The primary way of accessing the cluster machines is through ssh.
The nodes in the cluster all have access to a RAID-5 NAS, which provides high-bandwidth, high-capacity storage for all users.
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Visitors
Dr. Wally Melnitchouk QCD Prof. Peter Tandy QCD Dr. Laura Venuti Star formation
Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter (CSSM)
The CSSM has a strong international reputation and works at the forefront of advances in our understanding of the structure of hadronic matter. Hadronic matter makes up almost the entire mass of the tangible universe, from the protons and neutrons that are within the nuclei inside atoms and molecules, to neutron stars.
High-Energy Physics (HEP)
HEP is concerned with studying particle physics, particularly with regards to understanding physics at modern collider experiments and searching for new fundamental physical laws. This includes both the experimental and theoretical aspects of these topics.
Our researchers are also involved in the development and operation of computing resources for particle physics research, particularly GAMBIT.
ARC CoE for Dark Matter Particle Physics (CDMPP) - Adelaide node
A number of staff and students within the Group also are involved with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, which is exploring the nature of dark matter- one of the greatest puzzles in contemporary physics.
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2023 News
May 2023 : We are approaching the end of an era at CSSM. Sharon Johnson, who has made CSSM her home away from home for the last 28 years, is about to retire. In addition to the academic staff, generations of students have benefitted from her guidance and caring support. During her tenure, Sharon has successfully led the professional support for more than 40 conferences and workshops. She has also given support to a stream of international visitors, providing assistance with travel and accommodation as well as guidance on local customs and attractions. We thank Sharon for her outstanding service and wish her the very best in the next stage of her life.
March 2023 : Former NUPP PhD graduate, Prof. Phiala Shanahan (now at MIT), has been named "Innovator of the Year" at the South Australian Woman of the Year Awards, for her significant contribution to her field of research.
Farewell dinner for Sharon Johnson, May 2023.
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2022 News
November 28th : Professor Anthony Thomas (with Dr. Pierre Guichon (IRFU, Saclay)) was awarded ARC Discovery Project funding for the project "A New Approach to the Structure of Atomic Nuclei".
November 21st : we are pleased to announce that a LIEF grant proposal (details below) led by Professor Paul Jackson was successful:
- Enabling the future of the Australian collider physics program – the project aims to fund the continuation of Australia’s experimental particle physics program to explore how the universe works at its fundamental level. Researchers study subatomic matter at the energy frontier at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the intensity frontier at Japan’s SuperKEKB collider. Chief investigator: Professor Paul Jackson. Funding: $2,827,000.
November 19th : Professor Anthony Thomas presented a talk on The Role of Nuclear Power in a Sustainable Future at the 19th Biennial Meeting of the Alexander von Humboldt Association in Geelong.
November 16th : further to the item below, Professor Shannahan also was awarded the 2022 James McWha Rising Star Award.
November 14th : former CSSM PhD student Professor Phiala Shannahan (now at MIT) was awarded the Australian Institute of Physics' Ruby Payne-Scott Award for "...key insights into the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei using numerical and analytical methods and pioneering the use of machine learning techniques in lattice quantum field theory calculations in particle and nuclear physics."
August 19th : today marked the official completion of the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory, the future home of the SABRE South dark matter direct-detection experiment. Adelaide NUPP members, as part of the CDMPP, are working on this experiment.
The Seminar Series runs fortnightly on Wednesdays, at 16:00 in Room 121.
Everyone is welcome. Please also join everyone in the CSSM/CDMPP common area for afternoon tea/coffee after the seminars and a chance for an informal chat with students and academics.
If you would like to present a seminar, please contact the organiser, Liam Hockley (liam.hockley@adelaide.edu.au), or Anthony Thomas.
It has run for many years (with a break in 2020), and is an excellent forum for discussing recent work and results.
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2023 Seminar schedule and details
Date Presenter Topic 2023/04/05 Matthew Fewell Tackling a loose end: a proposal for a model-independent measurement of B-meson spin 2023/03/15 Meera Deshpande Master's completion review
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2022 Seminar schedule and details
Date Presenter Topic 2022/11/02 Gabriel Collin Statistical inference of astrophysical point-sources 2022/10/19 Utku Can Lattice 2022 review 2022/09/21 Max Amerl MPhil work on hadron jets 2022/09/07 Various Cairns 3MT presentations; Tony Williams (Dark matter, SUPL and SABRE) 2022/08/10 Various Cairns 3MT presentations; and Peter Tandy, Wally Melnitchouk, Zhan-Wei Liu on academia 2022/06/29 A/Prof. Ross Young Precision measurements and Lattice QCD 2022/06/22 A/Prof. Claudia Szabo LGBTQIA+ Ally Training 2022/06/15 Dr. Irene Bolognino Status of the SABRE experiment 2022/06/01 Dr. Harish Potti Shedding light on a single truth quark 2022/05/11 Dr. George Stamatescu Dynamic mean field programming 2022/05/04 Prof. Paul Jackson A Career in Academia 2022/05/04 Dr. Laura Venuti (SETI) Colours of stellar youth - Dynamical evolution of young stars and their planet-forming disks across the wavelength spectrum 2022/04/14 Dr. Yong Zhao (Argonne) Lattice QCD Determination of the x-dependence of PDFs 2022/04/06 Dr. Dipan Sengupta How Valid Are Theories of Extra Dimensions?
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2021 Seminar schedule and details
Date Presenter Topic 2021/12/15 Dr. Waseem Kamleh PaCER / EmPRiSM: The path to Exascale computing 2021/10/13 Various Senior PhD student updates 2021/08/04 Shanette de la Motte Diversity and Inclusion Activities of the Belle II Collaboration 2021/07/20 Mischa Batelaan / Tomas Howson / James Biddle Nucleon Form Factors from the Feynman-Hellmann Method in Lattice QCD / Direct Measurement and Renormalisation of Quark and Gluon Momentum Fractions in the Quenched Approximation / Centre Vortex Structure in 2+1 Flavour QCD 2021/07/07 Anna Mullin Network analysis for particle colliders 2021/06/23 Dr. Harish Potti Seeing a single top quark: Search for the associated production of a single top quark and a photon with the ATLAS experiment 2021/06/09 Melissa McIntyre A New Model for Dose-Response of Cells in Hadron Therapy 2021/05/26 Dr. Ryan Bignall (Swansea) Magnetic Polarisabilities from lattice QCD 2021/05/12 Prof. Tony Thomas Short-Range Correlations and the EMC Effect: via Nuclear Structure and Neutrino Stars 2021/04/28 Alec Hannaford Gunn Generalised parton distributions from lattice Feynman-Hellmann techniques
Over the last two-and-a-half decades, staff and students in the various NUPP areas have organised and participated in a large number of workshops and conferences.
These range from local or national events that include mainly Australian participants, to major international conferences involving hundreds of delegates. The history of these events provides a valuable insight into the progress of these investigations at Adelaide, the changes in local personnel over the years, and developments in the topics covered by this research.
A list of past events may be found here.
Beyond the Standard Model
NUPP researchers discuss the benefits that come from our close collaboration between theory and experiment that is engendered by the proximity between the CSSM and HEP (formerly the Adelaide node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics, CoEPP) within our department.
Contact us
Tel: +61 831 33533
Email: cssm@adelaide.edu.au
Location:
Room 126, Physics Building, North Terrace campus, University of Adelaide
Page author : Dr. Padric McGee