Prof. Adrian Bevan
Activities and interests

I am a physicist working on the Belle 2 and ATLAS experiments and conducting research and development on radiation detector technologies for scientific and societal applications.

I Joined BaBar in October 2000 after completing a PhD on the CERN based experiment NA48 at Cambridge University's HEP Group. On NA48 I developed an interest in rare kaon decays and this has been transferred to the B system where I have worked on charmonium and charmless B decays, concentrating on precision CP violation measurements. I worked as a post-doc at Liverpool university for just over 5 years after which I joined Queen Mary, University of London as a Lecturer. The rest of this page outlines my research activities on ATLAS, BaBar, SuperB, NA48, and publications. A summary of seminars and conference talks is available here.

ATLAS research activities. (2008 to date)

I work on the upgrade of the ATLAS tracker system. The QMUL group involvement in this work revolved arround the Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) barrel upgrade, and design of a pixel endcap system. In addition to this I am working on the implications for radiation protection, so that this important aspect is factored into the upgrade design from day one.

With regard to the current ATLAS detector - I am working on understanding the effects of planar distortions on silicon sensors and how that feeds into our ability to do physics. In terms of data analysis I am working on an angular analysis of the rare B decay to K*mumu using the 2012 data. A preliminary result using 8TeV data is described in ATLAS-CONF-2017-023. I also contributed to the CP violation in b decay from top quark pairs, published as J. High Energ. Phys. (2017) 2017: 71. I have graduate students working on the search for Higgs boson decays into a bb final state via di-Higgs production and Higgs production in association with a vector boson.

Generic detector development. (2008 to date)

In addition to detector development for the ATLAS ITk upgrade I am working on several aspects of generic radiation detector development using semiconductors. This work can lead to detector concepts for a future ILC or the CEPC.

SuperB research activities. (2008 to 2012)

This was a proposed experiment that was cancelled in 2012 due to the ongoing financial uncertainty in Europe. I was physics coordinator of that project, and advised on the physics programme for a potential tau-charm factory that could have been a smaller scale project in line with the original scientific goals of SuperB. My main interests for this programme were in terms of time-dependent CP and T violation tests using B and D decays, and for lepton flavour violating tau decays.

BaBar research activities. (2000 to date)

 BaBar was my main research activity post-graduation until the completion of the Physics of the B Factories book. I focused on measurements of CP violation, highlights of which are the determination of a method to measure the unitarity triangle angle alpha (now known to 5o), the measurement of the angle beta (now known to better than 1o) and searches for a number of rare decays. I am one of five editors of the Physics of the B Factories, a book to be published by Springer.

Physics Analysis

CKM Angle Alpha and related topics

I am a main author of the CP violation measurement of B0->rho+rho-. Thus far, this work has yielded three journal publications: (82/fb result: PRL), (210/fb result: PRL), and (349/fb: PRD). In addition there were several preliminary results presented at the winter conferences in 2003 and 2004 and summer 2006 (on 316/fb). Early on in these studies, I determined that using experimental knowledge of the B->rhorho decays one can limit the penguin uncertainty in B->rhorho. In addition I performed the first isospin analysis on BaBar of the B->rhorho decays, showing conclusively that the time dependent measurement from B0->rho+rho- constitutes a measurement of alpha.

I wrote a review article on the measurement of alpha at the B-factories (hep-ex/0512048). This has been published in Modern Physics Letters A.

I performed a search for the rare B decay B0->a1+/-rho-/+ (hep-ex/0605024: PRD-RC). This decay mode is a background to B0->rho+rho-. It also happens to be sensitive to alpha (although extraction of the CKM angle from this decay would be extremely difficult).

I have played a major role in the early searches for B0->pi0 pi0 since joining BaBar. I was the main author of this analysis from Winter 00/01 through to summer 03. This work has been done in conjunction with others within BaBar's 2-body analysis working group and led to results being presented at Moriond and ICHEP in 2002, and at Lepton Photon in 2003. There is a conference paper conference paper and hep-ex/0303028: PRL from the ICHEP '02 result. The LP '03 result also resulted in a hep-ex/0308012: PRL. Upon observation of this decay mode, it became clear that the isospin analysis in B->pipi would provide very limited constraints for the foreseeable future. This motivated my interest in B->rhorho decays as described above.

CKM Angle Beta and related topics

With a colleauge from QMUL, I produced the paper 'Evidence for CP Violation in B0->J/Psi pi0 decays', by measuring a non-zero value of sin2beta in that mode using the full BaBar data sample (See arXiv:0804.0896).

With a colleauges from Caltech, Irvine and Maryland, I worked on the final BaBar update of the measurement of sin2beta from ccbars decays. A preliminary result was produced for the ICHEP 2008 conference (hep-ex, arXiv:0808.1903). This was followed up with (hep-ex, arXiv:0902.1708), which has been published as PRD 79:072009, 2009. At the time of publication this was the most precise determination of sin2beta.

Rare Charmless B Decays

I co-convened the Quasi-2-body AWG (password protected) with Alessandro Gaz (Colorado). This AWG has many interests, ranging from direct CP violation searches, Unitarity triangle angle measurements, through to probing the dynamics of B->VV decays and searching for rare hadronic B-decays and possible signs of new physics. This AWG typically produces 8 journal publications a year, and mainly concentrates on exclusive measurements of B-meson decays.

Other analysis interests which are ongoing include searches for rare B decays to VV final states.

The following is a brief summary of my activity in the MDI group on BaBar

I've worked on trying to understand how to use beam size measurements from PEP-IIs beam profile monitors for the low and high energy ring in terms of calculating the beam parameters at the interaction point. This is a relatively recent area of activity for me, and the intial results of these studies were presented at EPAC '06 (see the preprint physics/0607087), and a paper has recently been accepted for publication in NIM.

NA48 research activities. (1998-2000)

While on NA48 I completed an analysis of the rare kaon decay KL -> mu+ mu- gamma for my thesis. I also worked on Monte Carlo studies of Dalitz decays of the K0 meson and studied radiative corrections for K0->2mu2gamma, K0->pi02mu, K0->2e2mu and K0->4mu.

Publications/Presentations etc.

 The full list of my publications can be found on INSPIRE at this location. A selection of recent highlights of my work can be found below.

Papers and pre-prints

Lecture Courses

I have given lecture courses as detailed below. More details on these can be found via my Teaching Web Page.

I am the author of two books: The Physics of the B Factories (Springer) and a book on Statistical Data Anlalysis (Cambridge University Press). Some additional statistics related information can be found here.


Maintained by Adrian Bevan. Last updated on Feb 2021