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Department of Physics

The Cavendish Laboratory
 

Biography

Richard Batley works in the High Energy Physics Research Group at the Cavendish. He holds a BA(Hons) in Mathematics from Cambridge (1976), including Part III Mathematics (1977), and a DPhil in Experimental Particle Physics from Oxford (1981). He was a Fellow in the Experimental Physics Division at CERN (1981-83), and a Research Assistant and SERC Advanced Fellow at Queen Mary College London (1984-89). In 1989, he was appointed an Assistant Lecturer at Cambridge, becoming a Lecturer in 1994 and a Senior Lecturer in 2002.

Research

As a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, I work on experimental tests of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. My work focuses on precision measurements of the production rates of pairs of gauge bosons (mainly Z boson pairs, but more recently the production of a Z boson together with a photon). These measurements not only test the SM (providing indirect limits on possible new physics beyond the SM) but are also important in connection with studies of the Higgs boson, for which gauge boson pairs are the primary source of background. An offshoot of this work, also relevant to Higgs physics, was the observation of the rare decay of the Z boson to four charged leptons and a measurement of its branching ratio.

Before joining ATLAS, I worked on several other CERN-based experiments, including NA48 (making the then most precise measurement of the lifetime of the K-short meson, and the first observation of the rare decays KS → π0e+e and KS → π0μ+μ), OPAL (electroweak physics again, measuring the branching ratio for the decay of the Z boson to b-quark pairs) and UA1 (carrying out one of the first searches for supersymmetric particle production at a hadron collider).

Publications

Key publications: 

G. Aad et al. [ATLAS Collaboration], Measurement of the Z(→l+l-production cross-section in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector, JHEP 2003 (2020) 054, arXiv:1911:04813 [hep-ex].

M. Aaboud et al. [ATLAS Collaboration], ZZ → l+l-l'+l'- cross-section measurements and search for anomalous triple gauge couplings in 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector, Phys. Rev. D 97 (2018) 032005, arXiv:1709.07703 [hep-ex].

G. Aad et al. [ATLAS Collaboration], Measurements of Four-Lepton Production at the Z Resonance in pp Collisions at √s=7 and 8 TeV with ATLAS, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112 (2014) 231806, arXiv:1403.5657 [hep-ex].

G. Aad et al. [ATLAS Collaboration], Measurement of the ZZ production cross section and limits on anomalous neutral triple gauge couplings in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108 (2012) 041804, arXiv:1110.5016 [hep-ex].

G. Aad et al.  [ATLAS Collaboration], The ATLAS Inner Detector commissioning and calibration, Eur. Phys. J. C 70 (2010) 787, arXiv:1004.5293 [physics.ins-det].

J. R. Batley et al. [NA48/1 Collaboration], Observation of the rare decay KS → π0μ+μ, Phys. Lett. B 599 (2004) 197, arXiv:hep-ex/0409011.

J. R. Batley et al.  [NA48/1 Collaboration], Observation of the rare decay KS → π0e+e, Phys. Lett. B 576 (2003) 43, arXiv:hep-ex/0309075.

A. Lai et al. [NA48 Collaboration], A measurement of the KS lifetime, Phys. Lett. B 537 (2002) 28, arXiv:hep-ex/0205008.

R. Akers et al.  [OPAL Collaboration], Measurement of Γ(Z → bb)/Γ(Z → hadrons) using a double tagging method, Z. Phys. C 65 (1995) 17.

P. P. Allport et al. [OPAL Collaboration], The OPAL Silicon Microvertex Detector, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 324 (1993) 34.

C. Albajar et al. [UA1 Collaboration], Events with Large Missing Transverse Energy at the CERN Collider (Paper 3): Mass Limits on Supersymmetric Particles, Phys. Lett. B 198 (1987) 261.

R. Batley et al., A Highly Segmented NaI(Tl) Detector with Vacuum Photodiode Readout For Measuring Electromagnetic Showers at the CERN ISR, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 242 (1985) 75.

P. Allen et al. [WA21 Collaboration], Transverse Momentum Distributions of Hadrons in Deep Inelastic Neutrino-Proton Scattering, Nucl. Phys. B 188 (1981) 1.
 

Retired University Senior Lecturer
University Senior Lecturer
Fellow of Christ's College
Dr. Richard  Batley

Contact Details

Email address: 
Room 953, Rutherford Building
Cavendish Laboratory
JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 0HE
+44 (0)1223 337434

Affiliations

Specialities: 
Person keywords: 
High Energy Physics