Ben Samways

Position: Postgraduate Research Student
Institution: Physics & Astronomy (FPAS)
E-mail: ben.samways@soton.ac.uk
Contact: Complete this online contact form to contact Ben.

I am currently enrolled as a Postgraduate Research Student in the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation. Previously I studied at the University of Southampton where I graduated with an MPhys in Particle Physics, which involved time spent working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

My research is based in the Southampton High Energy Physics group where I work on Lattice QCD with my supervisor Jonathan Flynn.

Our best understanding of the strong force of nature is through the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This describes the strong interactions at the level of fundamental quarks and gluons. In experiments we observe bound states of these particles, a complex zoo of hadrons, the dynamics of which are impossible to extract analytically from the theory. Lattice QCD is the discretised version of QCD, which allows the theory to be simulated numerically, and experimental observables calculated.

Currently I am working on techniques to calculate all-to-all propagators in an attempt to increase the signal from disconnected contributions to meson correlators. I hope to then use these techniques to investigate eta and eta prime mesons and the QCD vacuum.