Dr Matt Kenzie

Biography

I am an experimental particle physicist and part of the Cavendish High Energy Physics Group. I am currently the Team Leader of our Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) group and I have been a member of LHCb since 2014.

My predominant research interests involve searching for, and measuring CP violation (a violation of the symmetry between matter and anti-matter) in B meson decays using data from the LHCb experiment at CERN. These measurements provide a powerful and precise test of the Standard Model and are sensitive to New Physics particles at extremely high energy scales.

I currently hold an ERC Starter Grant for the “KstarKstar” project (underwritten by the UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee) which studies charmless B → VV decays in order to extract information on CP violating quantities. This funds several of the PhD students and post-docs in my group.

I perform the world averages for the CKM unitarity triangle angles as a member of the Particle Data Group and the Heavy Flavour Averaging Group and I am convener of the HFLAV unitarity triangle subgroup.

Beyond the LHC I’m also very excited about potential future facilities in particular the planned Future Circular Collider at CERN and my group has started investigated the physics reach such a machine could have for heavy flavour decays when running in electron-positron collision mode at the Z-boson threshold.

I have previously held an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship for the project “Getting a flavour for New Physics with precision measurements of tree-level beauty decays” which predominantly exploits LHCb data to better constraint the CKM unitarity triangle angle γ. Prior to that I was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, and a Research Fellow at CERN.

I also oversee several detector R&D and hardware projects within the group. Our main commitments involve designing and testing the fast electronics for LHCb’s soon-to-be upgraded Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector, which can determine the species of charged particle passing through it based on the light emitted as it passes through gas. Our other involvement is in Silicon MAPS technologies for use in future particle detectors, including LHCb’s upgraded downstream tracking system. These activities are funded by the Consolidated Grant and the UKRI Infrastructure Fund.

I have held several positions within the LHCb Collaboration including as the UK Physics Coordinator, an Editorial Board member and as a convener of the Beauty to Open Charm Group, the Flavour Tagging Group and the Statistics and Machine Learning Group.

I did my PhD (2010-2014) at Imperial College London on the Higgs decay to two photons, H → γγ, at the CMS experiment, under the supervision of Paul Dauncey.

For a complete list of publications please see inspirehep.net