Franz Muheim

Prof Muheim is Head of the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics and Head of the Particle Physics Experiment Group.

Prof Muheim's research interest is in experimental particle physics. He is an expert on heavy flavour physics and he investigates the difference between matter and antimatter by measuring CP violation in  beauty and charmed mesons. He is a member of the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN where he was PI of the eleven participating UK Institutes with ~150 collaborators.  With LHCb data he is currently studying  CP violating asymmetries and rare decays of Bs mesons to search for new physics in quantum loop transitions beyond the standard model of particle physics. 

Prof Muheim has measured the CKM matrix element Vub describing the transition between u and b quarks with the BaBar and CLEO experiment.

Prof Muheim is an expert on instrumentation and with his team at Edinburgh has played a leading role in the construction of the  Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detectors (RICH) for the LHCb experiment, in particular in the R&D, assembly and commissioning of the RICH photon detectors. He is interested in building new  detectors to upgrade the LHC experiments in the high luminosity phase and for future accelerators.

Prof Muheim has taught courses at many levels, from 1st year "The Physics of the Universe" to final year "Particle Physics". He is currently teaching Subatomic Physics. He is also the course organisers for Senior Honours projects and supervises SH projects  (muon lifetime) and MPhys projects (LHCb data analysis). Prof Muheim has been involved in several working groups on curriculum development, including in a large restructuring and investment in laboratory teaching.