Data taking

Posted on 23/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

A break from funding crises… We are in the last physics run of the Large Hadron Collider before we go into a long shutdown to upgrade the beam intensity.

Courtesy of ATLAS, the experiment I work on, you can see the status of the accelerator here: Event Counter Info.

And we have an Event Counter running, telling you how many high-energy proton collisions have happen, and roughly how many Higgs bosons will have been produced in those collisions.

More collisions, and more Higgs bosons, are important because, quantum mechnics being essentially random, the more data we get, the smaller the uncertainties will be on the multitude of things we measure. We have also produced summary of some recent results, that we sent to the Moriond 2026 conference.

That’s the point of the upgrade – more collisions. And improved detectors, so we can learn more from them.

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Cuts, Commitments, and Contradictions

Posted on 09/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

After my previous post on the parliamentary committees last week, I think it is worth highlighing this blog post by Lucien Heurtier.

Lucien is a postdoctoral research associate in theoretical physics at King’s College London. As well as having a valuable perspective on the committee meetings I discussed, he was also one of the group of fellows and early career researchers who signed letters (here and here) about the cuts to particle, astro and nuclear physics. As such, he had a meeting last Tuesday with Sir Ian Chapman and Prof Michele Dougherty (heads of UKRI and STFC respectively) and Prof Grahame Blair (STFC’s Executive Director of Programmes). I found his account of that meeting quite revealing.

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Select committees

Posted on 08/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

Well, the fight to stop the decimation of particle, astro and nuclear physics continues.

The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology select committee session I mentioned in the previous post happened. The above picture is one of the lighter moments in what was an intense couple of hours.

I thought the committee were impressively well informed and on point in their questioning, both of us and of Michele Dougherty, the executive chair of STFC. You can read the transcript, and if you’re really keen watch the recording, on the official parliament site. I think a lot of important information came out. There is a good write-up by Frances Jones in Research Professional, for example.

Also significant was the appearance of the Science Minister, Lord Vallance, and the Secretary of State Liz Kendall, in the House of Lords Science and Technology committee the day before. You can see the transcript and recording here.

The most interesting exchange I took away from this was:

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A trip to the House of Commons

Posted on 01/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

Having had a very interesting meeting at the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago, this Wednesday I will be giving evidence on science funding to the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.

Big changes are being implemented in the way UKRI allocates taxpayers money to fund research in national laboratories and universities. While the intentions may be good (and the total amount of money being allocated has not shrunk), the changes are being implemented without a good understanding of their impact.

There have already been huge negative effects on particle, astro and nuclear physics. Because they happen to sit in the Science and Technology Facilities Council – the same research council which runs national facilties for the whole of UKRI – they are being drastically cut in order to fund increased costs at those facilities.

I am very glad the committee are looking into this. I hope the session helps UKRI, STFC and the ministry think again.

https://committees.parliament.uk/event/26683/formal-meeting-oral-evidence-session/

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