What is Experimental Particle Physics?
Experimental Particle Physics (EPP) is the experimental arm of high energy particle physics. Our research is in probing matter to discover the underlying structure of matter; attempting to answer the age old question What are we made of?’. Around 460 B.C., the Greek philosopher, Democritus, develop the idea of atoms. He questioned what happened when matter was divided continually; could we go on forever or would we reach a final point? He believed the latter, that you could only cut something up a finite number of times, until you reached the `atom’. His ideas were squashed by a more famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle. It wasn’t until the 1800s when the English chemist, John Dalton performed experiments with various chemicals and that showed that matter did consist of elementary lumpy particles, the atoms of Democritus. Accepted as existing today, the atom was thought to be the smallest that matter could be reduced to but the atomic revolution at the end of the 19th and beginning of t
