Current Activities
Alan Norton is a senior research physicist, mainly involved in software and physics analysis. He is a long-standing member of the NA62 Collaboration, initially with CERN, more recently with Ferrara (Italy), and currently with the University of Glasgow.
He continues to work on challenging calibration and reconstruction issues at High Intensity, both for the "old" Liquid Krypton Calorimeter (LKR), and for the "new generation" incoming Kaon beam spectrometer (Gigatracker or GTK).
He is also supporting application of the Glasgow Automatic Validation Tool to check and control the evolution of detector responses through various stages of the bulk reconstruction and analysis.
Previous Activities
Since graduating from Edinburgh and Oxford in the 1960s, Alan has been involved in a series of major discovery and precision experiments at CERN.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked on Hydrogen and Heavy Liquid Bubble Chamber experiments. For Gargamelle, he was the main developer of RAMSES, an Interactive System for scanning and reconstruction of neutrino events, used in Neutral Current discovery. He also contributed to the large geometrical reconstruction packages, LBCG and HYDRA.
With the CCHK Collaboration, he then designed new software for reconstruction and analysis of events in the Split Field Magnet at the ISR.
In the late 1970s, Alan joined the UA1 Collaboration at the ppbar collider, and became responsible for the software and application framework, leading to W/Z discoveries. In parallel, he developed calibration procedures for the Central Detector, worked with Julius Zoll on ZEBRA, and completed a project to use 3081 Emulator farms for on-line and off-line analysis, in collaboration with CERN and SLAC . He conceived and managed the UA "Express Line" for fast analysis and interactive scanning of W/Z boson candidates.
From 1984, Alan coordinated UA1 physics analysis and preparation of publications, and was UA1 Spokesman from 1989.
Since 1993, Alan has worked on the suite of NA48 and NA62 CP Violation experiments at CERN. In NA48 he coordinated the offline software, data processing and central computing resources for analysis and publication of eps'/eps and rare kaon decays. He developed quasi on-line calibration procedures for the Liquid Krypton calorimeter which are still evolving today in the NA62 C++ framework.