Dr Christopher Lester
Lecturer
Biography
Dr Lester is an experimental high-energy particle physicist — currently the Team Leader of the Cambridge ATLAS group having been a member of the ATLAS collaboration for his whole research career. He has frequently lectured the Part III Particle Physics course, and served as Senior Examiner for Part II for many years. In the past he has lectured the Part II Particle and Nuclear Physics and Part IB C++ courses. He is also a Fellow of Peterhouse where he is a Director of Studies and Graduate Tutor.
Research
Most of his work and research has been associated with the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. From 2001-2010 he was heavily involved in the commissioning of the ATLAS Semiconductor Tracker. From 1998-2015 he was involved in programmes which developed the theory underpinning kinematic event variables designed to exploit momentum conservation and correlations between reconstructed particle momenta to constrain models proposing new particles; notably supersymmetric models, and models proposing so called “large extra dimensions”. From 2015 to the present his work has moved to fully data driven searches for violations of fundamental symmetries (“Fully data driven” means not comparing data to predictions.) That work has necessitated the development of new methods for calibrating the ATLAS detector which are orders of magnitude more precise than the previous state of the art — as well as minor work in involving improvements to the ATLAS Muon Sagitta Biases.
In 2026 onwards he has been required to take charge of the Cambridge production of semi-conductor modules for the upgraded ATALS inner tracker. He has had passing interest in trackless ring finding algorithms used in the Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector of LHCb – another CERN, experiment, and has a current side interest in methods for Lorentz and/or permutation-invariant embeddings of collider event data.
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