Particle Physics investigates the fundamental building blocks of nature and how they behave. Conceptually its origins can be traced to when humans first started to question what their world was made from. Just as the ancient Greeks considered that everything was made from fire, earth, air, and water, today we categorise all matter as either leptons or quarks which can interact by exchanging force-carrying particles called bosons.

Normal everyday matter is made from up and down quarks, electrons and neutrinos (leptons). The force-carrying particles are the photon (light), gluons which 'glue' the atomic nucleus together and (virtual) W bosons causing radioactive decay.

To study the interactions of these particles and to create heavier partner states as well as anti-matter states, we need to recreate such energetic conditions as last appeared shortly after the Big Bang. This can be done using giant particle colliders such as those at CERN in Switzerland.

At UCD, we have the only experimental particle physics group in Ireland. We are currently helping to build a new generation of experiments that will operate at the highest energy collider in the world, the LHC, when it starts at CERN in 2007. We will analyse data from these collisions and answer fundamental questions about our universe such as 'What is the origin of mass?' and 'Why is there an asymmetry in nature that gives us so much matter and so little antimatter?'

When the experiments start, terabytes of data will be produced every second. Recording and analysing this data requires sophisiticated algorithms and new computing paradigms. Essential to physics success is Grid Computing. The DGET Project, undertaken jointly between Physics and Computer Science at UCD and CERN, is developing tools for the management and data-mining of distributed data-sets.

For more information, please contact Ronan McNulty.