Welcome to the site of CERN physicist and data scientist Dr Dónal Hill (Marie Curie Individual Fellow at EPFL, Switzerland).
Details of Dónal's work and public engagement activities can be found here. For any public speaking or media enquiries, please feel free to contact him via email.
About
Dónal is a Marie Curie Individual Fellow in the particle physics department at EPFL in Switzerland, and is a member of the LHCb collaboration at CERN.
He is an enthusiastic science communicator who enjoys bringing the wonders of physics to a wide audience. Dónal is a past winner of the Swiss FameLab competition, and continues to be involved regularly in public engagement.
Away from physics, Dónal is an Irish folk musician and member of the acoustic duo Accord de Voix, sharing the stage with his wife Mie.
Dónal is a member of LHCb, one of the main experiments based at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. A core aim of LHCb is to try and push our understanding of antimatter even further, to help answer some fundamental questions about our Universe: Where did all the antimatter present in the early Universe go? Why is there something rather than nothing? Are there mysterious new particles and forces still waiting to be discovered?
Dónal's work focuses on squeezing the Standard Model of particle physics to breaking point, to try and pin down where any new particles might be hiding. By analysing the decays of B meson particles and their antimatter alter-egos, he makes measurements of a phenomenon known as CP violation.
CP violation is the only process currently known to cause differences between matter and antimatter. The trouble is, its effects in the Standard Model are just too tiny to explain where all of the antimatter present in the early Universe went!
Science communication
Dónal regularly participates in public engagement, and is available for lectures and school events. He was part of the LHC on Tour STFC exhibition and won FameLab Switzerland in 2013. His FameLab win was featured in the CERN bulletin, and won him a place in the international final at Cheltenham Science Festival.
In 2019 Dónal was involved in the Bodleain Library Thinking 3D exhibition (see video), and has also appeared on the Oxford Sparks Big Questions podcast. In 2021, he hosted the final of FameLab Switzerland.
Science Countdown
Cool science facts featuring the numbers 1 - 10
Prospects for Bc → tau nu at FCC-ee
20 December, 2021
Angular analysis of B0 → D∗- Ds∗+ with Ds∗+ → Ds+ γ decays
June 29, 2021
Measurement of CP observables in B± → D(∗) K± and B± → D(∗) π± decays using two-body D final states
April 9, 2021
Measurement of CP observables in B± → D K± and B± → D π± with D → K0S K± π∓ decays
June 8, 2020
Model-independent method for measuring the angular coefficients of B0 → D∗ τ ν decays
November 22, 2019
Performance of the LHCb trigger and full real-time reconstruction in Run 2 of the LHC
December 27, 2018
Selection and processing of calibration samples to measure the particle identification performance of the LHCb experiment in Run 2
March 2, 2018
Measurement of CP observables in B± → D(∗) K± and B± → D(∗) π± decays
February 10, 2018
Observation of Bc+ → D0 K+ decays
March 15, 2017
Measurement of the B± production asymmetry and the CP asymmetry in B± → J/ψ K± decays
March 22, 2017
Measurement of CP observables in B± → DK± and B± → Dπ± with two- and four-body D decays
September 10, 2016
Study of B0 → D* π π π and B0 → D* K π π decays
May 3, 2013
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers which can't be questioned."
Richard Feynman
