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Particle Physics Theory Group



Richard D Ball


Here and Now
Personal details:

Personal Biography:

In the past I have been: an undergraduate at St. John's College, Cambridge, a graduate student in DAMTP, Cambridge, an SERC Research Fellow at Imperial College, a Research Associate at ITP, SUNY at Stony Brook, a Research Fellow at NBI, Copenhagen, a Royal Society URF in Theoretical Physics and lecturer at Trinity College, Oxford, and a CERN Fellow. I first arrived in Edinburgh on a lectureship, as replacement for Peter Higgs. Since then I have held three CERN Associateships, and a Scientific Associateship at the NBI Discovery Center. I have been Principal Investigator on the Edinburgh PPT grant from STFC since 2005, and Chairman of the Board of Examiners in Mathematical Physics since 2011. In 2012 I created the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, which the following year launched new MSc programmes in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics.

Research interests:

My main interest in life is the study of elementary particles and their interactions, as revealed by experiments at particle colliders at CERN and Fermilab. Currently I am working on the application of perturbative QCD to high energy processes, with the particular aim of understanding hadronic collisions at the LHC. I am a member of the NNPDF collaboration, to determine unbiased parton distributions from a global analysis of deep inelastic and hadronic data sets. I am also interested in many other aspects of QCD physics, such as HERA physics and spin physics, and have in the past worked on the formulation of effective field theories, the exact renormalization group, and the structure of chiral gauge theories. For a more detailed impression of my interests check out my publication list.

Current teaching: