ALEPH at Royal Holloway

The Royal Holloway group was one of the founder members of the ALEPH Collaboration in the early 1980s. During the design, prototyping and construction phase we took sole responsibility for the second level trigger and worked together with other UK groups on the endcap electromagnetic calorimeter.

After data taking began in 1989 we played a full role in running the experiment. In particular the group was responsible for running and maintaining the second level trigger and providing major support to the electromagnetic calorimeter.

Most of the Royal Holloway physics analysis effort was in the ALEPH Searches group (we provided the convenor of this group) and in QCD. Particular areas in which we contributed to ALEPH publications include searches for excited states of leptons and quarks, supersymmetric leptons, scalar partners of the Z, heavy neutrinos and rare decays of the Z. In the QCD group we carried out a major analysis on charged particle multiplicities and the variation of QCD parameters with energy.

We contributed to the 1993 LEPC working parties on physics at LEP II to establish the physics implications of various energy-luminosity scenarios including the W mass measurement and searches for excited leptons. LEP ran at higher energy after 1995, reaching 200GeV in 1999 and 208GeV in 2000.

Members of the group also made significant contributions to data acquisition software and wrote event generators for the ALEPH library.

The ALEPH project formally came to an end in 2004
ALEPH - where is it now?