Conor Fitzpatrick I’m a detective. I’m an explorer. I’m a time traveller. I’m a builder of huge, hi-tech machines. I’m in different countries every other month, and I work with people from all over the world on a daily basis. 

What am I? 

I’m an Experimental Particle Physicist. 

When it’s said like that it doesn’t sound as cool does it? But my research lets me do all these things. I work on LHCb, one of the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the border between Switzerland and France. The LHCb detector is over half the weight of the Eiffel tower, and the other LHC experiments are even bigger! 

It’s like an enormous digital camera, taking photographs of particles as they are smashed together by the LHC at energies we’ve never made at colliders before, energies similar to that present in our early universe, just after the big bang. 

With the data we collect, myself and over 500 other experimenters from around the world are trying to understand why our universe exists in its present form.

Part of what attracts me to my work is how different it can be every day: I might be working on the detector in the cavern 100 meters underground or analysing the data in my office. I spend a lot of my time flying to conferences where I hear about the amazing things other particle physicists are doing, or giving talks to my colleagues in other universities. 

It’s a very sociable kind of work, and I frequently go skiing in the French Alps with my fellow experimenters on the weekends. 

Above all, the thing I enjoy most about my research is learning, understanding and discovering new things. It is this desire to understand that all my colleagues have in common, and to me that’s pretty cool.

Conor Fitzpatrick

About: Conor Fitzpatrick is a Ph.D Student at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently based at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.