Dr Paula Alvarez Cartelle

Biography

Paula Álvarez Cartelle works in the High Energy Physics group at the Cavendish. She completed her PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and has worked as a research fellow at Imperial College London and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). She came to Cambridge in 2020 as a University Lecturer. She was Team Leader for the LHCb group at Cambridge between 2022 and 2025. She was appointed Associate Professor in 2025. She is a Fellow and College Lecturer at Newnham College.

Research

My research focuses on the study of fundamental particles and their interactions. I am interested in exploring processes that ought to be very rare, given our current understanding of particle physics. I am a member of the LHCb collaboration at CERN, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. I specialise in precision measurements of b→s(d)ll quark transitions, where b and s(d) are down-type quarks, and l stands for lepton. These include tests of lepton-flavour-universality violation as well as CP violation. These kinds of processes provide the perfect laboratory to search for the effect of new particles and interactions, probing energy scales far beyond the reach of direct collider searches.

As the Team leader of the LHCb group at Cambridge, I supported the team’s activities in the development and operation of the LHCb detector. The group has important responsibilities in the readout electronics for the particle identification system (RICH). We are also working towards a major upgrade of LHCb planned for the High-luminosity phase of the LHC (LHCb Upgrade II). We are involved in the upgraded particle identification system and characterisation of the silicon sensors needed for the upgraded tracking system (Mighty Tracker).

You can find a list of my publications at INSPIREHEP.