Dave Charlton's research is focused on experimental tests of the mechanism(s) of electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, with the ATLAS Collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Until early 2017, Dave was Spokesperson of the international ATLAS Collaboration for four years. ATLAS is a global collaboration of some 3000 scientists. The Spokesperson is the scientific head of the collaboration. Prior to becoming Spokesperson, Dave was Deputy Spokesperson for four years, and before that Physics Coordinator of ATLAS in the run-up to the start of collision data-taking.
His research interests include various aspects of electroweak symmetry breaking: from the study of the Higgs boson, discovered in 2012 by ATLAS, with its sister experiment CMS; to further probes in high-energy processes such as gauge-boson scattering. He also maintains an interest in precision electroweak measurements at the LHC, following on from previous work in the 1990s on the OPAL experiment at the LEP collider at CERN.
During ATLAS construction in the 2000s, Dave led the Birmingham work on the ATLAS semi-conductor tracker (SCT), which involved building and testing several hundred hybrid readout circuits - now installed deep inside the ATLAS apparatus at CERN. He also worked on the first-level calorimeter trigger (L1Calo), especially its installation in the electronics cavern at CERN. He is now thinking about new algorithms and trigger strategies for the large upgrade of the LHC coming in the middle of the next decade.