astronomy

Sinead Farrington

Sinead Farrington is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Sinead Farrington rather than just read about it. In short: Sinéad Farrington is a British particle physicist who works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Farrington is interested in B physics, Higgs physics, tau physics, and long-lived particles.

Key takeaways

Sinead Farrington belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sinead Farrington to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sinead Farrington from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sinéad Farrington is a British particle physicist who works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Farrington is interested in B physics, Higgs physics, tau physics, and long-lived particles. She is a professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh. In December 2020 Farrington was named the physical sciences and engineering laureate for the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom 2021. From July 2024 Farrington will be director of the Particle Physics Department at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Early life and education Farrington was born in Torphins, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to John Farrington, a professor of geography at the University of Aberdeen, and Bernadette, a primary school teacher. She has one younger brother Conor. She attended St Margaret's School for Girls in Aberdeen before studying physics at the University of Edinburgh. She remained in Scotland for her doctoral research, moving to the University of Glasgow. Her research was on a measurement of the lifetime of the strange B meson as part of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration.

Research and career After completing her doctorate, Farrington joined the University of Liverpool as a research Fellow and whilst based at Fermilab co-led the CDF team that first established matter-antimatter oscillations in the B⁰_s system. Farrington went on to hold a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) advanced fellowship at the University of Oxford and a junior Kurti fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford. In 2011 she joined the department of physics at the University of Warwick where she set up her own research group on ATLAS. During this period she co-led the team on ATLAS that measured the decay of the Higgs boson to tau leptons establishing for the first time a Yukawa coupling of a scalar Higgs to fermions. She moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2018. She has also held a CERN associateship, is a senior experimental fellow at the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham University and is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford. She was awarded a European Research Council consolidator grant in 2018, to develop triggers and analysis techniques to allow searches for long-lived particles decaying to tau particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Since 2019, Farrington has been the Principal Investigator (spokesperson) for the 15 UK institutes on the ATLAS collaboration.

Recognition In 2020 Farrington was named the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Faculty Winner for the United Kingdom. She was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2022.

Selected publications ATLAS Collaboration; Aad, G.; Abbott, B.; Abdinov, O.; Abdallah, J.; Abeloos, B.; Aben, R.; Abolins, M.; Aben, R.; Abolins, M.; AbouZeid, O. S. (2016). "Test of CP invariance in vector-boson fusion production of the Higgs boson using the Optimal Observable method in the ditau decay channel with the ATLAS detector". The European Physical Journal C. 76 (12): 658. arXiv:1602.04516. Bibcode:2016EPJC...76..658A. doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4499-5. ISSN 1434-6044. PMC 5335599. PMID 28316497. The ATLAS collaboration; Aad, G.; Abbott, B.; Abdallah, J.; Abdel Khalek, S.; Abdinov, O.; Aben, R.; Abi, B.; Abolins, M.; AbouZeid, O. S.; Abramowicz, H. (April 2015). "Evidence for the Higgs-boson Yukawa coupling to tau leptons with the ATLAS detector". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2015 (4): 117. arXiv:1501.04943. Bibcode:2015JHEP...04..117A. doi:10.1007/JHEP04(2015)117. ISSN 1029-8479. CDF Collaboration; Abulencia, A.; et al. (December 2006). "Observation of B⁰_s - anti-B⁰_s oscillations". Physical Review Letters. 97 (24) 242003. arXiv:hep-ex/0609040. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.242003. hdl:10067/815500151162165141. PMID 17280271.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sinead Farrington

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sinead Farrington claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sinead Farrington before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sinead Farrington ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sinead Farrington

In research: Sinead Farrington appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sinead Farrington in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sinead Farrington is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century British physicists, 21st-century British women physicists, Academics of the University of Edinburgh, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sinead Farrington outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Sinead Farrington in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sinead Farrington means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sinead Farrington out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sinead Farrington in simple terms?

Why does Sinead Farrington matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sinead Farrington?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sinead Farrington.