Tim Gorringe
University of Kentucky, KY·Physics
The Standard Model of particle physics describes the known particles and forces. A key way to test it, and to search for anything it misses, is to measure rare decays very precisely.
- Fields
Physics
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
pion decay
Standard Model
lepton universality
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Build the high-performance data acquisition system for the Rare Pion Decay Spectrometer, including PCIe-over-fiber readout of FPGA chips and real-time pulse fitting for lossless data compression.
- Develop rule-based and machine learning algorithms for particle tracking and vertex finding, which reconstruct particle paths and decay points, and contribute physics simulations for the spectrometer.
- Measure the ratio of pion electronic-to-muonic decays 15-fold more precisely, giving the most stringent test of lepton universality, the idea that electrons and muons interact identically.
- Improve the measurement of pion beta decay 6-fold to address tensions in the CKM quark-mixing matrix, and search for dark matter, light axions, and heavy neutrinos with order-of-magnitude better sensitivity.
More about the research
The pion is a short-lived subatomic particle, and its rare decays are especially sensitive tests. The project builds a new Rare Pion Decay Spectrometer at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland to make these measurements.
Why it matters
Precise rare-decay measurements test whether the Standard Model holds. They can reveal or rule out unknown particles such as dark matter, light axions, and heavy neutrinos. The fast data acquisition, machine learning tracking, and detector components built here could also improve instruments used in nuclear and particle physics experiments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mark Ross-Lonergan
Columbia University, NY·Physics
Analyze the full MicroBooNE dataset, combining several reconstruction methods and about twenty final-state patterns, to test whether a single-photon excess explains the MiniBooNE anomaly through new physics or the Standard Model.
Walter Pettus
Indiana University, IN·Physics
Scale Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES), which measures electron energy from emitted radio waves, toward a multi-cubic-meter tritium experiment by leading control systems for Project 8 demonstrator apparatuses.
Suyog Shrestha
Washington College, MD·Physics
Search ATLAS data from the Large Hadron Collider for new Higgs-like scalar particles that decay into two bottom quarks and two W bosons, in final states with one or two leptons, a decay channel ATLAS has not yet studied.
The school
University of Kentucky: 34 labs on PI Pages, $528M a year on research, 319 research doctorates a year.
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