Professor Paul Newman BA (Oxon), PhD, FInstP

Professor Paul Newman

School of Physics and Astronomy
Professor of Physics

Contact details

Address
School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Paul Newman is the leader of the Birmingham Particle Physics Group and Director of Research for the School of Physics & Astronomy. His main area of expertise is the experimental study of the strong nuclear force, in particular the quark and gluon sub-structure of protons and nuclei and the behaviour of gluons at very high densities. He is currently working on collisions between ultra-high energy protons detected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and is also investigating future possibilities for electron-proton and electron-ion colliders at CERN and in the US.

Paul is engaged in particle physics strategy in the UK and Europe through committee work and writes occasional articles on science policy. He has taught a variety of subjects at all undergraduate levels in physics and gives frequent talks to school students and the general public.

For more detailed information, please see Paul’s personal web-page at http://epweb2.ph.bham.ac.uk/user/newman/

Qualifications

  • Winner of the 2008 Institute of Physics High Energy Physics Group prize, “for leading contributions to the measurement of proton structure at HERA”
  • PhD in Particle Physics, University of Birmingham, 1996
  • BA (Hons) in Physics, University College, Oxford, 1992

Biography

Paul Newman came to Birmingham as a PhD student in 1992. His PhD work was on the H1 experiment at the HERA electron-proton collider at DESY, Hamburg, where he continued working for 20 years, including a four year spell as the experiment’s physics coordinator.   

His most recent work is on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, in particular the identification and study of `diffractive' processes in which one of the beam protons remains intact.

Paul has a long history of involvement in proposals to build the next generation electron-proton collider, including the ‘LHeC’ project at CERN and the EIC project in the USA.

Paul is the principle investigator on the Birmingham Particle Physics grant from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In addition to a leading involvement in ATLAS, his group is also currently engaged in the LHCb, NA62 and DUNE experiments. It has substantial capabilities for R&D and construction projects with silicon tracking detectors as well as fast high throughput trigger and data acquisition electronics and runs a substantial site as part of the WLCG LHC distributed computing network.  

Teaching

Current teaching activities:

  •  Y4 Current Topics in Particle Physics lecture module
  • Y4 Projects: Particle Physics team leader and supervisor
  • Y3,4 Physics Critiques
  • Y2 Physics tutorials

Postgraduate supervision

Currently supervising PhD students working on the ATLAS experiment

Research

RESEARCH THEMES 

  • Diffractive Processes
  • Deep Inelastic Scattering
  • Proton Structure
  • Low x Physics
  • Strong Interactions and QCD
  • Silicon detector instrumentation
  • Fast, high throughput trigger electronics

RESEARCH ACTIVITY 

  • The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider
  • The LHeC Project
  • The H1 experiment at the HERA Collider

Other activities

  • Member of the CERN LHC Committee (2014-_
  • Member of the STFC Particle Physics Advisory Panel (2010-15, Chair from 2013-15)
  • Member of the STFC Fellowships Selection Panel (2009-11)
  • Steering Committee, LHeC project (2007-)
  • Executive Committee, H1 Collaboration (2004-6 and 2009-) 
  • Member of the CERN SPS and PS Experiments Committee (2006-10)
  • Physics Coordinator, H1 Collaboration (2001-4)

Publications

All ATLAS published papers can be found at: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/Publications 

All H1 published papers can be found at: www-h1.desy.de/publications/H1publication.fast_list.html 

All LHeC public material can be found at: http://lhec.web.cern.ch

Electronic copies of public presentations can be found at http://epweb2.ph.bham.ac.uk/user/newman/confs.html

View all publications in research portal