Paul Jackson

Professor Paul Jackson

Professor

School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences

Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology

Cutting-edge research | Elite problem-solving | Progressive mentoring | Imaginative solutions | Piercing vocals

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!

Event Displays from 2015 Exotic Multi-Jet and Di-Jet analyses

 

'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.

Presenting at 'Research Tuesdays', December 2015
Presenting to a full house at the University of Adelaide's 'Research Tuesdays', December 2015. This was my second Research Tuesdays talk (and fourth public lecture) at the University. Photo credit: Laura Vanags Photography.

 

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.

A summary of Adelaide's involvement in global fitting (left), hardware (centre) and kinematic techniques (right).

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!

There are exciting projects for students at undergraduate, honours, MPhil and PhD level. If you're interested in any of the topics below or something related, please get in touch! Projects covered 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