Work on LHC published in European Physical Journal C

Understanding how particles such as protons scatter in matter is crucial to the design and operation of beam collimation systems in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. These collimation systems remove stray particles that would otherwise cause damage to the accelerator or the particle collision detectors. Stray protons collide with the material of the collimator and scatter through variety of fundamental processes. Cockcroft Institute Researchers, working with the University of Huddersfield,  have produced the first ever global fit to all the relevant data for two of these processes, elastic and single diffractive scattering, producing accurate differential cross sections for these key processes. This means proton interactions with collimators can be understood to a new degree of accuracy, with implications for the Large Hadron Collider and future proton accelerators. The work is published in European Physical Journal C, and can be found at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4363-7