Black and white close-up of Professor Todd Huffman, who has short dark hair and wire-framed glasses

About

Title
  Fellow and Tutor in Physics
College appointment
Vice-Principal
Academic position
  Governing Body Fellow
Subject
  Physics
Related Course
  Physics, Physics and Philosophy

Contact details

Telephone
274307 (LMH); 273402 (Department)
Visit Professor Huffman's departmental page

Biography

I am an experimental physicist in high energy particle physics. My current research projects are in association with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to coming to Oxford I was a researcher with the University of Pittsburgh doing research at the Collider Detector Facility (CDF) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where my research was searching for, and then finding and studying, the B_c meson (a particle consisting of the bound pairing of a bottom quark and a charm quark).

Research interests

I am interested in learning more about the Higgs Potential. This is how we think all particles of matter acquired inertia which then couples to the Higgs boson. To study this we need to find events in our accelerators that contain multiple Higgs bosons, 2 or more.

I am also interested in Higgs portal methods of searching for Dark Matter being produced in our accelerators. Being able to produce and then study Dark Matter at will would give us a lot of insight into the substance that seems to be 5 times more prevalant in the Universe than normal matter.
All this research takes place at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva Switzerland.

Teaching

Within Oxford I currently Lecture and tutor in circuit Theory for the first and second year courses. I also tutor quantum physics, 3rd year Special relativity and covariant electromagnetism, 3rd year sub-atomic physics, and first and second year calculus and linear algebra.

I also supervise Project students every year and usually have at least one graduate student working in my research areas.

Selected publications

"Search for nonresonant pair production of Higgs bosons in the bb¯bb¯ final state in pp collisions at s√=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector" Submitted to Phys. Rev. D - https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03212


"Search for resonant pair production of Higgs bosons in the b¯bb¯b final state using pp collisions at √s=13  TeV with the ATLAS detector" https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.092002

Physics

The fundamental rules which govern all interactions within the Universe.