OL Hunting for Dark Energy

Jack Lindon OL left the College in 2012 and has taken his education to some interesting places. Jack remembers his A level physics studies with Mr Hall and Mr Gunawardena fondly and is completing his PhD this year. He wrote to us from CERN where he is investigating the mystery of dark matter:

As well as this I'm the only member of the monojet group that works on a very new analysis, which is a dark energy analysis. There's never been a collider based search for dark energy before, however a new model of dark energy (called horndeski theory) postulates a new scalar field that interacts with both gravitational fields and matter fields in such a way as to produce a small cosmological constant and accelerate the expansion of the universe. This scalar field can be excited to produce a particle which I'm searching for with monojets, which are very sensitive to this model as the interaction with the scalar field is enhanced at high momentum transfers (which are involved in the production of a high energy jet).

Along with this, interactions can also be enhanced by high mass particles, so I work alongside the top-antitop group with this. We recently put out a paper (please click here to read) and we were featured on the 7th page of the CERN courier this month (The one titled 'Colliders Join the Hunt For Dark Energy') and I've been to a fair few conferences around the world to give talks about it which has been great (a particularly good one was in Venice). I find it very exciting to be strongly involved with a brand new era of collider based searches. We're particularly sensitive compared to other experiments, for high mass dark energy scalar particles and high couplings, our results compared to other experiments.

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