Professor Jeff Forshaw 

Telephone
0161-275-4220

Fax
0161-275-0480

Address
School of Physics & Astronomy
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
 

Research Interests

I work on the phenomenology of elementary particle physics. That means I spend much of my time trying to figure out what the data from the world's particle physics experiments are telling us about the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions with each other.  My particular interest is in the physics of the Standard Model and Beyond.

If you would like to learn more about particle physics, you might like to take a look at my Introduction to Modern Day Particle Physics.

I am particularly interested in the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. The LHC at CERN will start later this year with the goal of finding the Higgs boson, our current best candidate to explain the symmetry breaking and on that subject I gave the 2007 Spreadbury Lecture at University College London entitled   "Does there have to be a Higgs boson?"

I'm also very interested in high energy scattering in QCD and the physics of diffraction.  When elementary particles collide at high energies they diffract off each other, just like waves of light diffract around apertures in ordinary optics. By studying the diffraction pattern we can learn about the nature of the elementary particles which are involved in the collision and about the nature of their interaction with each other. The particles diffract off each other by exchanging gluons and these gluons organise themselves into compound states called reggeons. At high energies it may be more appropriate to think in terms of reggeons rather than quarks and gluons.

The Spires database can provide a list of my publications.

Web course on  Quantum Field Theory in Particle Physics and Apostolos Pilaftsis' notes on Supersymmetry.

Some graduate theses:  Norman Evanson; George Kerley; Agustin Sabio Vera; Theo Diakonides; Anahita New; Gavin Poludniowski; Chikara Kimura; Yu Wei; Ruben Sandapen; James Monk

Books

"Why does E=mc2" is a popular science book written with Brian Cox and was published by da Capo in July 2009. "Dynamics & Relativity" is textbook written together with Gavin Smith. It is primarily an undergraduate level text and was published in 2009 by Wiley. "QCD and the Pomeron"was written with Douglas Ross. It is an advanced text and was published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press.

Talks

Some other pages