Welcome
to the home page of Dr.Christopher Booth.
This page contains links to my researchand teaching activities in the Departmentof Physics and Astronomy of the Universityof Sheffield.It also contains a little information on otherinterests and activities in my private life.
Research Activities
I am a member of the High Energy Particle Physics group of the Departmentof Physics and Astronomy.A general overview of our activities areavailable on our groupresearch page.My main areas of research are in the field of neutrino physics,and the preparation for a Neutrino Factory.I was also an active member of the ALEPH experiment at CERN.- Neutrino Factory target studiesThe ultimate machine for studying neutrino physics will be a Neutrino Factory.This will consist of a storage ring containing large numbers of muons, with longstraight sections pointing at distant detectors.As the muons decay, the neutrinos and antineutrinos produced will form intensebeams.However, there are many challenges to be overcome before a Neutrino Factory can be realised.In order to produce a large enough number of muons, a proton beam of several megawatts must strike atarget.For many materials, the thermal shock produced by such a beam will simply blow the targetto pieces!In Sheffield, we are studying these shocks, and trying to investigate whether a suitable conmbination of target material and beam pulse profile will allow a target to survive.
Further details of this and other Neutrino Factory work in the UK can be found atthe UK Neutrino Factory pages.
- MICEIn the Neutrino Factory complex, protons hitting a target produce pions, which decayto give the muons which must be collected and accelerated in a storage ring.However, the produced muons have a wide range of speeds and directions, and mustbe "cooled" before they can be trapped and stored.The Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment, MICE, is an international project to test andverify a method of cooling the muons before they have decayed away.Sheffield's chief contribution to this experiment, which will be performed at theISIS accelerator at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, is to build a target drive mechanismwhich will dip into the ISIS beam, to produce the muons to be cooled.
Further information is available from our Sheffield MICE group's pages.
- HARP is an experiment studying low energy hadron production.This is of interest both for the design of a proposed muon collider and neutrinofactory, and in order to better understand the production of neutrinos whenhigh energy cosmic rays interact in the upper atmosphere.Further details are available from the HARP experiment web pages at CERN, and I am responsible for the UK HARP web pages.
In Sheffield, we designed and produced the target support cap, made of extremely thin aluminium, and are analysing the data in order to improve computer models of hadronicinteractions.
- ALEPH This experiment ran at LEP, the largeelectron positron collider at CERN, from 1989 to 2000.Information aboutour group's contribution are summarised on the Sheffield ALEPH page, and further material is available from the CERN ALEPH page.
My own research contributions over recent years are in the followingareas:- I had hardware responsibility for the T0 module,electronics which provided an interface between the accelerator timingsignals and the trigger and component detectors of ALEPH.
- I was a member of the ALEPH Compositeness group, looking for any evidencethat the particles (such as the electron) which we currently believe arefundamental might really have some substructure.A popular accountof part of this work is available in material from a talk I gave entitled"Is the electron a Composite Particle?"Further reports and papers on this topic are included in our group publications page.
- More recently, I worked within the ALEPH Supersymmetry group.My areaof research concentrated on looking for heavy,unstable sleptons which decay within the body of the detector.When combined with other searches, it helps to provide significant constraintson the parameters of the Supersymmetry theory, within the framework ofgauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking.
Teaching
As Third Year Tutor, I am responsible for the organisation of teaching for thisimportant year of undergraduate Physics degrees, as well as teaching two core thirdyear courses myself.My lecture courses have associated material available online,as indicated in the links below.Other third year material, particularly for the student projects and problem solving module, for which I am responsible, are also available.I also provide tutorials in Second Year Physics, and act as an Undergraduate Advisor.
Private Life
Outside work, I enjoy spending time with my family - my wife and two daughters. We all appreciate the out-doors, walking, camping and I am a keen bird-watcher.I am also an active member of my local church, AllSaints' Totley, and, amongst other duties, am responsible for maintainingits web pages.