Dr Richard Batley
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).
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