Professor Paul Jackson

I hold two roles at the University of Adelaide: Deputy Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology and Professor of Physics in the School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences.

I am funded through the Australian Research Council Linkage and Discovery schemes and lead the Adelaide Experimental Particle Physics group. We test the fundamental forces of nature and search for new particles and phenomena. We analyse data from the ATLAS experiment located at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland and the Belle II experiment at KEK in Tsukuba, Japan while also contributing to the operations and upgrade of these facilities. 

My groups area of study is in searches for as yet undiscovered phenomena using new kinematic techniques. We leads searches for evidence of supersymmetric particles and other exotic phenomena with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hardon Collider and played an important role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. We take pictures of high-energy collisions with the ATLAS detector to disentangle the building blocks of nature. 

Leading to images like these!

'Research Tuesdays' Public Lecture: ColliderScope  - Presented at the University of Adelaide, December 8th, 2015

'Research Tuesdays' Public Lecture: Master of the Universe - Presented at the University of Adelaide, August 30th, 2012.

With ATLAS we have access to the WLCG (Worldwide LHC Computing Grid) to analyse data recorded by the detector at CERN.

We are expanding our local tier-3 computing centre to store and process huge volumes of ATLAS data and host the Monte Carlo simulation required to perform different detector studies and analyses. These computing resources are also being expanded to store data for Belle II.

The Adelaide group works towards the maintenance, operation and upgrade of the ATLAS detector. This includes building a world-class electronics laboratory on the Adelaide campus. This is a great opportunity for the training of students and staff in state-of-the-art techniques for high bandwidth DAQ R&D.

Other research opportunities in our group cover particle phenomenology, the development of a global fitting tool called GAMBIT, beam loss monitoring for high energy particle accelerators and medical physics applications of GEANT4 modelling (in conjunction with SAHMRI). I am one of the main developers of the Recursive Jigsaw Reconstruction technique.

The Adelaide group are active in the ATLAS collaboration and prominent in Australian particle physics. We are members of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics more details can be found here: https://centredarkmatter.org.au/. Contact me if you would like to know even more! 

Current Postdoctoral researchers mentored: 

• Dr Shreya Saha (formely of McGill University)
• Dr Gabriel Collin (formerly MIT)

Previous Postdoctoral researchers mentored:

• Dr Harish Potti (Postdoctoral research associate at University of Sydney)
• Dr Jason Oliver (Postdoctoral research associate at University of California, Irvine)
• Dr Abhishek Sharma (Postdoctoral research associate at University of British Columbia)
• Dr Andreas Petridis (formerly Stockholm University, now data analyst in finance sector)
• Dr Larry Lee (formerly Harvard University, now Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Tennessee)
• Dr Nitesh Soni (now Director of Advanced Analytics, ScotiaBank, Toronto, Canada)

Opportunities for Students!

Our team are currently working on a number of research directions.

Physics at the LHC with multiple top-quarks: Our team work on measuring production and decay of the top quark in the ATLAS data in association with many other particles including additional top quarks (up to four), Higgs bosons, W and Z bosons - and potentially dark matter candidates.

Direct production and evidence for dark matter: We are interrogating the LHC data collected with the ATLAS experiment to search for evidence of dark matter, produced in the collisions, and passing through our detector. We perform these searches by measuring other particles present in sets of decays and considering properties of the events such as their angular properties and the amount and direction of the missing momentum to give as clues as to the origin of events.

Upgrading the ATLAS tracking system - ITk: We have recently installed a new dedicated cleanroom facility to work on the testing and characterisation of the modules destined for the end-caps of the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk) silicon strip detector. This facility is in place to also potentially use for future detector upgrade projects.

There are many exciting projects for students at undergraduate, honours, MPhil and PhD level. If you're interested in any of the areas of research above, or the topics below (or something related), please get in touch! Projects covered broadly include:

• Data Analysis with the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC - searches for Dark Matter, Leptoquarks and Supersymmetric particles
• Data Analysis with the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC - measurements of the Higgs boson, top quark and W boson.
• Upgrading the ATLAS tracker system to the new ITk (inner tracker) for the High-Luminosity LHC era.  
• Data analysis with the Belle II experiment at SuperKEKB, Tsukuba, Japan - measuring leptonic and semileptonic B decays
• Using collider physics and astrophysics to constraint dark matter signatures
• Studies for the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) and SABRE-south experiment
• Computing solutions to improve particle detector simulation