Professor of Experimental Particle Physics
Professorial Fellow of Emmanuel College and Director of Studies in the Physical Natural Sciences
Cavendish Laboratory,
JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0HE
Websites:
Biography:
Mark Thomson is Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge. He has over 700 publications covering a number of major areas in High Energy Particle Physics. His main research interests are in electron-positron collider physics, neutrino physics and the development of novel and powerful reconstruction techniques for cutting edge detector technologies. In addition to his research activities, he has chaired a number of scientific reviews for STFC and until recently was the chair of its main peer-review committee. He is the author of “Modern Particle Physics”
which is a major new undergraduate textbook covering all areas of contemporary particle physics.
Research groups
Research Interests
Mark Thomson’s main research activities are centred around three main areas. He is one of the leading figures in the UK working on the physics and detector design for the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) which may be hosted in Japan. This electron-positron collider would be the next major collider after the LHC, with the main goals of making precision measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson. He is also the world-leading expert on high-granularity particle flow calorimetry, which is driving the design of future collider detectors at the ILC, CLIC and beyond. In addition to his activities in collider physics, Mark Thomson is co-leader of the UK effort in the LBNE experiment, which is the next generation of long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, aiming to discover CP violation in the leptonic sector. In the context of neutrino physics, he is also a member of the MicroBooNE collaboration, where he is leading the development of advanced reconstruction algorithms for large liquid Argon neutrino detectors.
Key Publications
Modern Particle Physics, Thomson, M.A., Cambridge University Press (2013).
Improved search for muon-neutrino to electron-neutrino transitions in MINOS, MINOS collaboration, Phys. Rev. Lett 107 (2011).
Particle Flow Calorimetry and the PandoraPFA Algorithm, Thomson, M.A, NIMA 611 (2009).
Measurement of the mass and width of the W boson, OPAL Collaboration, Eur. Phys. J. C45 (2006).
Precise determination of the Z resonance parameters at LEP, OPAL Collaboration, Eur. Phys. J. C19 (2001).