School of Physics & Astronomy

Andrew Lytle, a postdoctoral researcher in the particle physics theory group, has won one of two poster prizes awarded at this year’s DiRAC Day.
DiRAC is the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s High Performance Computing Facility which covers work by UK theorists in all areas of particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics. The £15m facility consists of 5 component facilities at 4 different sites. DiRAC Day showcases the research done on the facility along with a technical session on hardware and software and is sponsored generously by the computer industry. This year DiRAC Day was held in Edinburgh on September 9th.

Andrew reported on research done on the strong interaction effects on bottom quarks undergoing a decay, via the weak interaction, to charm quarks. This work will allow an improved understanding of how bottom quarks couple to the W boson of the weak force, when the results are compared to experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider. The calculations were carried out on the Darwin cluster of 9600 Intel Sandybridge cores with infiniband interconnect at Cambridge, which is one of the machines in the DiRAC facility. The work forms part of the programme of the High Precision QCD collaboration.

First published: 12 September 2016