Jon Butterworth

Jon Butterworth is a Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL.

Jon joined UCL as a lecturer in 1995, after receiving a DPhil from Oxford and spending three years as a postdoc at Penn State. Much of that time was spent in Hamburg, working on the ZEUS experiment at the DESY electron-proton collider. He now works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron collider, where he and several thousand colleagues discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.

His research career has centred on measuring particle scattering cross sections at colliders, and using the results to extract information about the fundamental particles and forces of nature. This has included design and contruction of some of the detectors, with the expert support of engineers in the high energy physics group. His main technical contributions however have focussed on software, ranging from online "triggers" for data selection, through to sophisticated simulations of the particle interactions themselves. Apart from the Higgs discovery, he made the first measurements of the production of the "jets" formed by quarks and gluons scattered in high energy photon-proton collisions, used these to gain information about the internal structure of the proton. After spending 2003-2004 as physics chair of ZEUS, he moved completely to ATLAS and in 2010 led the first measurement of jets at the LHC. From 2010-2012 he convened the "Standard Model" working group for ATLAS.

Jon enjoys working in big collaborations, but says it is important to have some independent projects too, ideally with fewer committees involved in writing the papers. Outside of the big experiments, he has papers on particle phenomenology, the most highly cited of which is a simulation for multiple quark and gluon interactions in hadronic collisions - the so-called "JIMMY generator". (Contrary to tradition this not an acronym, but an allitertive working title that unfortunately stuck.) Another major contribution was the development of methods for looking inside jets, especially in the context of Higgs searches.

Jon is committed to public engagement, and from 2011-2018 wrote a regular blog/column for the Guardian newspaper. He still writes this when he can (see lifeandphysics.com). His books for the general public, "Smashing Physics" and "A Map of the Invisible" are published by Hachette (2014) and Penguin (2017) respectively.

Having grown up in Manchester, Jon was not initially well-disposed toward "that London", but became a fan very quickly and now considers himself a Londoner, having married one and brought up a son and a daughter here.

Although he has been at UCL for more than twenty years, he doesn't feel he has lacked variety, because, he says, "UCL and London are a fantastic base from which to do new things. Apart from spending time in Hamburg and Geneva, and exploring the media world a bit, I have been a vice-Dean, Head of Department and head of what is a really exciting high energy physics group here at UCL. All bring different challenges, and I am still finding opportunities to learn and explore here."