Dave Britton

• Email: D.Britton@physics.gla.ac.uk
• Telephone: +44 141 330 5454
• Fax: +44 141 330 5881
• Secretary: +44 141 330 4702 (Valerie Flood)
• Administrator: +44 141 330 8569 (Suzanne Scott)
• Office: Room 480, Kelvin Building

Dave Britton is a professor of physics at the University of Glasgow and Project Leader of the GridPP project that provides Grid computing for particle physics throughout the UK. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN with an interest in Higgs decaying to a pair of tau-leptons. Previously he worked on CMS, another of the LHC experiments, qualifying the crystals that make up the end-caps of the electromagnetic calorimeter. He has also worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (the BaBar experiment); Cornell (the CLEO experiment); and at DESY in Hamburg (the ARGUS experiment) with an empahsis on tracking detectors. Earlier work at TRIUMF in Vancouver established the most stringent limits on lepton universality through rare pion decays.

He has been involved with the GridPP project since conception in 2000 and was one of the lead authors of the proposals for all three phases. Intially appointed as Project Manager, he took over as the GridPP Project leader in 2008. GridPP is a collaboration of Particle Physicists and Computing Scientists from 19 UK Universities together with the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory and CERN, who have built a Grid for Particle Physics.

• The GridPP Website.

• Grid Talks

Historical Instruments

I was mooching around a auction house in Glasgow (waiting for my wife to buy a must-have Victorian Parlour Organ) and the words "Solar Neutrinos" caught my eye, written on an envelope in a trunk of "junk". To cut a long story short, the eventual purchaser of the trunk-o-junk happily gave me the envelope (for free; which is more than can be said for the Organ) and inside was correspondance between Ray Davies Jr and Prof. G.M. Lewis of "The Department of Natural Philosophy" at "The University" in Glasgow. I surmise that Prof. Lewis was writing a book and had requested information and pictures from Ray Davis. So, in a curious twist of fate, the papers are now back in the Kelvin Buiding. There are some samples below. No doubt one day the papers will be move on again; but given my children's endless attempts to get past the first few bars of Bach's Toccata and Fugue, I suspect the organ might go first!