Mr Alex J. Finch
Research Officer
Room: B50 Physics Building
Tel: +44 (0)1524 593618
Fax: +44 (0)1524 844037
Email: a.finch@lancaster.ac.uk
Member of the Lancaster Particle Physics Research Group
Research Interests
My research effort is currently solely within the T2K collaboration. I am developing the event display software. This produces pictures of the interactions in the detector and is a vital tool for the collaboration from checking the data when it is first collected, through developing reconstruction algorithms, and finally analysing the physics results.
For most of my career before moving to T2K my main research interest has been the field of photon photon collisions. The photon is a fundamental particle of the `Standard Model' of matter so by studying its interactions we are able to study many aspects of the model, but in particular the strong force which binds atomic nuclei together.
For many years my research took place as part of the ALEPH collaboration at CERN using the electron positron collider. This was the original accelerator to occupy the tunnel now used by the LHC. I recently measured the rate at which two colliding photons produce a final state containing b quarks using techniques for identifying b quarks that had not previously been used for data of this type.
In addition to my research work I act as system manager for the High Energy Physics group's computers, as well as helping to teach Java and C++ programming in the department.