Professor Alan Barr
About
Professor Alan Barr has been involved in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 1999, when that experiment was still in the research and development phase.
Part of his research has been development, assembly and operation of the precision semiconductor strip detectors.
A separate thread of Professor Barr's research has been searching for new particles – particularly Higgs bosons and dark matter particles. As well as searching for (and helping occasionally find) new particles, he has developed many of the techniques which are used to measure their properties – such as their mass, spin and decay modes.
A further area of work has been on probing the foundations of quantum theory at high-energy colliders, using techniques from the world of quantum information theory to perform measurements at the Large Hadron Collider.
Looking towards the future, Professor Barr's group is also exploring the physics potential of the new experiments and future colliders.
Expertise
- Particle physics
- Collider physics
- Quantum physics and quantum information
Selected publications
- Quantum entanglement and Bell inequality violation at colliders (2024)
- ATLAS Run 2 searches for electroweak production of supersymmetric particles interpreted within the pMSSM (2024)
- Quantum state tomography, entanglement detection and Bell violation prospects in weak decays of massive particles (2022)
- The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC (2022)
- Testing Bell inequalities in Higgs boson decays (2021)
- `That looks weird' - evaluating citizen scientists' ability to detect unusual features in ATLAS images of LHC collisions (2016)
- Higgs Self-Coupling Measurements at a 100 TeV Hadron Collider (2014)
- A Review of the Mass Measurement Techniques proposed for the Large Hadron Collider (2010)
Media experience
Professor Alan Barr has extensive experience being interviewed for print and broadcast media, including The Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Sun, Sky News, ITV News, Channel 4 News, the BBC including online publication and local radio (Oxford, Kent, Manchester, West Midlands, Orkney), BBC 5 live, BBC 6 music, National Geographic channel, World Radio Switzerland, Radio New Zealand, Fox FM, Jack FM, The Oxford Times, the Coleraine Chronicle, Ballymoney Times, City Talk (Liverpool), Seven FM (NI).
Languages
English