Marie Curie Actions: Inspiring Researchers - Imdea

Recreating the earlyuniverseParticle physics is the study of tiny particles, including thesmall pieces of matter that build up in the world around us andparticles which carry fundamental forces, such as photons.Physicists fi nd out all about minute objects by studying collisionsbetween them. If they have enough energy, colliding particlescan create new particles.Particle physics is also key to developing new technologiesand know-how that can change our lives in a big way. Forexample, all microelectronics around us, like mobile phonesand global positioning system (GPS) navigators, make use oftheoretical particle physics. Even the search for novel sources ofenergy cannot escape its rules. Interestingly, some of the mostimportant inventions of the past century, such as the WorldWide Web and medical therapy combating cancer, were onlymade possible by particle physics. It includes the biggest andmost complex experiments in the history of science, using thefastest computers and the strongest magnets.Modern particle physics involves fi ring particles at other particlesto create new ones inside a particle accelerator. Such experimentscan help us learn about the early universe, because conditionssimilar to our world all those years ago can be recreated in asmall space using these collisions.Dr Pierpaolo Mastrolia, an Italian national, wanted to push thelimits of our understanding about physics phenomena via ‘newfrontiercolliding machines’, as he calls them. His Marie CurieFellowship began at the University of Zürich in early 2006 andlasted for almost two years. While there, he developed a verypowerful method for computing the probability of producingnew particles when a collision among sub-atomic particlestakes place.Know your particlesDr Mastrolia’s method is based on the exploitation of generalmathematical properties of fundamental interactions betweensub-nuclear particles (all particles, including those that resultfrom high-energy collisions). It can therefore be applied in all thecontexts of particle physics by admitting a so-called perturbativeGeneralised-Unitarity System of Equations© Pierpaolo Mastrolia317