During his PhD, Niall primarily developed a measurement of the difference in how neutral charmed mesons transform into anti-mesons and vice versa, a phenomenon is known as charge-parity symmetry (CP) violation in mixing, using data collected by the LHCb experiment. The main result of his thesis was recently published in PRL (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.101803). Additionally, he performed a measurement of the absolute luminosity at the LHCb interaction point using the beam-gas imaging technique. This method involves reconstructing collisions between the protons in the LHC beams and gas atoms injected into the beam-pipe to directly reconstruct the 3-dimensional beam profiles. This result is currently in internal review, aiming at a publication in early 2025. During his PhD Niall worked closely with Prof Paul Soler and Dr Patrick Spradlin, as well as other members of the Glasgow LHCb group. He is now a post-doctoral researcher in the Glasgow PPE group, and continues to work on further measurements of CP violation in charmed mesons and develops simulation software for future upgrades of the LHCb experiment.

Niall's PhD supervisor, Prof Paul Soler adds that "Niall carried out two outstanding pieces of work for his PhD thesis: he was able to search for matter-antimatter asymmetry for the first time in the untested decay of charm mesons to three pions and he was able to use a new beam-gas imaging technique to measure the luminosity at the LHCb detector to an unprecedented precision at a hadron collider. Each analysis on its own would make for an excellent PhD thesis topic, but the fact that Niall was able to successfully bring to completion these two pieces of work, make Niall’s thesis truly exceptional."

Congratulations Niall!

First published: 21 October 2024

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