Join Professor Mitesh Patel, Professor of Physics, Department of Physics, for his Imperial Inaugural online or in person.
There is no need to register to attend so please be sure to use the add to calendar button.
We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 29 January!
Summary
Our knowledge of fundamental particles and the interactions between them is embodied by a mathematical description that physicists call “The Standard Model”. For more than 50 years, this model has provided a description of essentially everything we observe in experiments with incredible precision. Despite this success, the Standard Model has some very significant holes: it provides no explanation for the origin of the striking patterns we see in the properties of the different fundamental particles; it can explain the composition of only a small fraction of the matter we think exists in the Universe; and it provides no description at all of the force with which we are most familiar, gravity. We know definitively that the Standard Model is not the complete picture.
Processes that involve a quantum loop of particles that exist for only a fleeting instant and then disappear again could help us transform our picture. Mitesh Patel is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London and has spent his career measuring a family of such quantum-loop processes. In his inaugural lecture he will explain how some of these measurements may be giving us the first hints of phenomena that cannot be described by the Standard Model, and how we might use the next generation of experiments to finally understand if these measurement are really “new physics”.
About the speaker
Mitesh Patel studied the fundamental particles known as strange quarks for his PhD research but has spent most of his career measuring beauty or b-quarks. His research is conducted at the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where he was involved in developing the experimental hardware as a CERN research fellow, before analysing the first data at the start of the experiment while a CERN staff physicist. Having moved back to the UK as a research fellow and then Imperial faculty, he has conducted a programme of measurements using data from LHCb over the last 15 years, and his research group have developed various upgrades to the experiment.
