IOP at Liverpool
Vice-Chancellor, Prof Tim Jones, giving the opening address at the conference.
The Institute of Physics annual conference of the combined Astro-Particle Physics (APP), High-Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) and Nuclear Physics (NP) communities, was hosted by Liverpool this year from April 8-11th. Liverpool Vice-Chancellor Professor Tim Jones opened the meeting, welcoming approximately 350 attendees. In addition to many high profile national and international plenary speakers, over 200 UK PhD students presented their work in the parallel and poster sessions, which offered attendees a chance to learn in detail about the very broad and rich physics programme across the three UK communities.
A sombre moment came when attendees learned that Nobel Laureate and Edinburgh University Professor Peter Higgs had sadly passed away at the age of 94. Although most famous for his prediction of the eponymous Higgs Boson, discovered at CERN in 2012, Professor Higgs had been a teacher and a colleague to many present at the meeting, and a toast was raised to him at the meeting. He no doubt would have enjoyed seeing the wide range of physics being presented and discussed at the meeting.
There were major contributions from Liverpool physicists, with an impressive 27 talks given by University of Liverpool staff and students, as well as a plethora of posters presented by Liverpool students in the 2 poster sessions which featured over 50 posters in total. These included Jack Hughes (Exploring nuclear shapes and sizes of Thulium using laser spectroscopy), Katie Ferraby (Measurement of the electric dipole moment of the muon at the Fermilab g-2 experiment) and Kamran Hussain (Progress towards Strontium Atom Interferometry at RAL Space), who won prizes for their posters.
The conference meal was a chance to celebrate the wonderful physics on show at the meeting, and to forge connections for future collaborations. It was attended by the Vice Chancellor and pro-Vice Chancellor for Global Engagement and Partnerships, Prof Tariq Ali, as well as the top management from the STFC and from major laboratories in the US and Asia. It was held at The Crowne Plaza hotel on the Liverpool Docks on Wednesday evening. The meeting concluded on Thursday, with talks delivered by invited guests who lead some of the major laboratories in the US, Europe and Asia, setting out the priorities and future programme at their respective institutes.