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Jon Butterworth

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Jon Butterworth
Jon Butterworth speaking at Winchester Science Festival in 2013
Born
Jonathan Mark Butterworth

1967 or 1968 (age 58–59)[1]
Education
Alma materUniversity of Oxford (BA, DPhil)
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsParticle physics[4]
Workplaces
ThesisPerformance of the ZEUS second level tracking trigger and studies of R-parity violating supersymmetry at HERA (1992)
  • Doug Gingrich[6]
  • Herbi Dreiner[7]
Website

Jonathan Mark Butterworth is a professor of physics at University College London (UCL)[3][8] working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His popular science book Smashing Physics,[9] which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014[10] and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.[11]

Early life and education

[edit]

Butterworth was raised in Manchester and educated at Wright Robinson High School in Gorton and Shena Simon Sixth Form College. He studied physics at the University of Oxford, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in particle physics in 1992.[12] His PhD research used the ZEUS particle detector to investigate R-parity violating supersymmetry at the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA) at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg,[13] and was supervised by Doug Gingrich[6] and Herbert K. Dreiner.[7]

Research and career

[edit]

After completing his PhD, Butterworth spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher for Pennsylvania State University, primarily working in Hamburg on ZEUS.[14] He joined the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL in 1995, serving as head of department from 2011 to 2018[14][15], and was appointed Professor of Physics in 2015[16].

As of 2017[needs update] Butterworth works on particle physics, particularly the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His research investigates what nature is like at the smallest distances and the highest energies – the fundamental physical laws.[17] This tells us about the physics which was most important in the first few moments after the Big Bang.[17] His research collaborators[4][6][18] include Brian Cox[10][5] and Jeff Forshaw[19] and he has supervised or co-supervised several successful PhD students to completion on the ATLAS experiment,[20][21][22] ZEUS[23][24][25][26] and HERA.[27][28][29][30][31]

Butterworth frequently discusses physics in public, including talks at the Royal Institution and the Wellcome Trust and appearances on Newsnight, Horizon, Channel 4 News, Al Jazeera, and BBC Radio 4's Today Programme and The Infinite Monkey Cage.[9] He appeared with Gavin Salam in the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) documentary Colliding Particles - Hunting the Higgs, which follows a team of physicists trying to find the Higgs Boson.[32]

His research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)[33] and the Royal Society.[17] In 2026 he spoke publicly[34] about the potential impacts of significant funding cuts from STFC in PPAN (Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics) research, including the cancellation of £250 million of planned investment into four major infrastructure projects[35][36][37] amid overall annual budget cuts of around 30%[38] (which he described as "catastrophic"[39]: Q2 ), which could lead to hundreds of PhD and postdoctoral positions being cut, affecting the financial viability of physics departments within UK universities.[34][37] Butterworth later gave evidence to the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee about the proposed budget cuts, particularly the impact on early-career researchers and on the position and standing of the UK within large international PPAN collaborations[39], saying "we have international meetings coming up at the end of the month where our name is going to be mud if this is not sorted out".[39]: Q27 

Butterworth was a member of the STFC Council from April 2021 to March 2025[40][39], and has served on the governing council of UCL since 2021.[15] In July 2026, Butterworth was elected President of the Institute of Physics, starting in the role from October 2026.[41]

Bibliography

[edit]
  • Smashing Physics (2014)
  • A Map of the Invisible (2017)

Awards and honours

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Butterworth was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2009[17][3] and shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2015 for his book Smashing Physics,[3] which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year by Physics World in 2014.[42] He was awarded the James Chadwick Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2013.[3][43] His citation at the IOP reads:

He made the first measurements of the production of the hadronic 'jets' produced when quarks and gluons scatter in photon-proton collisions, and was Physics Chair of the ZEUS experiment in 2003/2004. He led the first measurement of jets and dijets at the LHC. He coordinated the ATLAS "Standard Model" group for the first two years of data-taking, leading more than fifty papers to publication. He has also made key phenomenological improvements related to the understanding of jets, including multiple-parton interactions, parton densities in the proton and photon, and the substructure of jets. These ideas, especially those on interrogating jet substructure, have been widely used in searches for Physics beyond the Standard Model. For example, for the identification of highly boosted (as a result of being created at very high energies) decays of top quarks, jet substructure studies are essential because frequently the decay products of the top quarks all appear inside the same jet of hadrons. Identification of boosted Higgs bosons has also proved to be the most sensitive way of identifying Higgs decays to b-quarks. He has written several seminal phenomenology papers on these topics. He has also developed several software packages which are very widely used in the simulation, measurement and understanding of high-energy collider data. Butterworth has worked on design, construction and development of the ZEUS and ATLAS detectors and their upgrades, including leading the successful bids in the UK for a microvertex detector upgrade for the ZEUS detector, and the first stage of the ATLAS detector upgrades in the UK.[2]

References

[edit]
  1. ↑ Anon (2013). "Ich Bin Kentishtowner: Jon Butterworth, 45, physics professor". kentishtowner.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2013-04-24.
  2. 1 2 Anon (2013). "Jon Butterworth: 2013 Chadwick Medal and Prize". iop.org. London: Institute of Physics. Archived from the original on 2015-07-08.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Butterworth, Jon (2017). "Jon Butterworth, UCL Institutional Research Information Service (IRIS)". iris.ucl.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2017-03-16.
  4. 1 2 Jon Butterworth publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  5. 1 2 "Butterworth, Jonathan M." inspirehep.net. INSPIRE-HEP.
  6. 1 2 3 "Jonathan M. Butterworth profile 1014844 HEP names". inspirehep.net. INSPIRE-HEP.
  7. 1 2 Dreiner, Herbert (2015). "Herbert Dreiner CV" (PDF). th.physik.uni-bonn.de. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-16.
  8. ↑ Butterworth, Jonathan (2016). "Jonathan Butterworth: High Energy Physics Group". hep.ucl.ac.uk. London: University College London. Archived from the original on 2016-12-31.
  9. 1 2 Butterworth, Jon (2014). Smashing Physics: Inside the world's biggest experiment. London: Headline Publishing Group. p. 352. ISBN 978-1-4722-1033-3. OCLC 915942320. (available as "Most Wanted Particle" in Canada and the USA)
  10. 1 2 Anon (2015) Smashing Physics - with Jon Butterworth and Brian Cox on YouTube published by the Royal Institution, London
  11. ↑ Butterworth, Jon (2013). "Life and Physics". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 2013-08-05.
  12. ↑ Butterworth, Jonathan Mark (1992). Performance of the ZEUS second level tracking trigger and studies of R-parity violating supersymmetry at HERA. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 53502705. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.315880.[permanent dead link]
  13. ↑ Butterworth, J.; Dreiner, H. (1993). "R-parity violation at HERA". Nuclear Physics B. 397 (1–2): 3–34. arXiv:hep-ph/9211204. Bibcode:1993NuPhB.397....3B. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(93)90334-L. ISSN 0550-3213. S2CID 17523206.
  14. 1 2 "Jon Butterworth". Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University College London. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  15. 1 2 "Professor Jon Butterworth". University College London. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  16. ↑ Krause, Michael. CERN: How We Found the Higgs Boson. WORLD SCIENTIFIC. doi:10.1142/9789814623476_0016. ISBN 978-981-4623-55-1.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Anon (2016). "Professor Jonathan Butterworth: Research Fellow". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2017-03-16. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.""Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 2016-11-11. Retrieved 2016-03-09.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  18. ↑ "Jon Butterworth's articles". arxiv.org. arXiv.
  19. ↑ Butterworth, J. M.; Cox, B. E.; Forshaw, J. R. (2002). "WW scattering at the CERN LHC" (PDF). Physical Review D. 65 (9) 096014. arXiv:hep-ph/0201098. Bibcode:2002PhRvD..65i6014B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.65.096014. S2CID 118887006.
  20. ↑ Baker, Sarah J. (2013). Studies of jets, subjets and Higgs searches with the ATLAS detector. discovery.ucl.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 926384795.
  21. ↑ Ochoa de Castro, Maria Inês A. J. (2015). Searching for the Higgs boson in the bb decay channel with the ATLAS experiment. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 927016691. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.644424. Free access icon
  22. ↑ Davison, Adam R. (2011). Exploring electroweak symmetry breaking with jet substructure at the ATLAS experiment. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 778953562.
  23. ↑ Wing, Matthew (1999). The study of heavy quark production in high Et photoproduction at HERA using ZEUS detector. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London. OCLC 855166362.
  24. ↑ Targett-Adams, Christopher (2006). Dijet photoproduction and the structure of the proton with the ZEUS detector. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 926256726.
  25. ↑ Loizides, John Harry (2005). Charm at HERA I and HERA II with the ZEUS experiment. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 500379717.
  26. ↑ Lightwood, Matthew Stephen (2005). Dijet production and multiscale QCD at HERA. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 500514269.
  27. ↑ Butterworth, Jon (2016). "Jonathan Butterworth's current and former PhD students". hep.ucl.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2017-03-16.
  28. ↑ Gwenlan, Claire (2004). Jets and energy flow in photoproduction using the ZEUS detector at HERA. ethos.bl.uk (PhD thesis). University College London (University of London). OCLC 940115440. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.408401.
  29. ↑ West, Benjamin John (2001). Charm and the virtual proton at HERA and a global tracking trigger for ZEUS (PhD thesis). University College London. OCLC 926990757.
  30. ↑ Heaphy, Eileen Anne (2002). Jet photoproduction and photon structure. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London. OCLC 78549753.
  31. ↑ Saunders, Robert Luke (1997). A measurement of dijet photoproduction at HERA using the ZEUS detector. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University College London. OCLC 53600177.
  32. ↑ Anon (2009). "Colliding Particles - Hunting the Higgs". collidingparticles.com.
  33. ↑ Anon (2017). "UK government grants awarded to Jon Butterworth". rcuk.ac.uk. Swindon: Research Councils UK. Archived from the original on 2017-03-30.
  34. 1 2 Butterworth, Jon (2026-02-16). "These cuts to physics research will be a disaster for UK scientists – and for our standing in the world". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  35. ↑ "UK to scrap more than £250mn in planned physics project funding". www.ft.com. Archived from the original on 2026-02-18. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  36. ↑ "IOP responds to cancellation of UK funding for major international science projects | Institute of Physics". www.iop.org. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  37. 1 2 Jones, Frances (2026-01-30). "UKRI shelves physics infrastructure projects worth £280m". Research Professional News. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  38. ↑ "UK physicists raise alarm over planned funding cuts". www.ft.com. Archived from the original on 2026-02-11. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  39. 1 2 3 4 "Oral evidence: Scientific research funding, HC 1741". House of Commons. 2026-03-04. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  40. ↑ "Minutes of the STFC Extraordinary Council meeting" (PDF). Science and Technology Facilities Council. The Cosener’s House, Abingdon: United Kingdom Research and Innovation. 2025-01-21. p. 6. Retrieved 2026-07-23. On behalf of Council, MKD extended sincere thanks to Pam Thomas, Hiranya Peiris and Jon Butterworth as they step down from STFC Council.
  41. ↑ "IOP 2026 Council election results announced". Institute of Physics. 2026-07-22. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
  42. ↑ "Book of the Year 2014". Physics World. 16 December 2014. Retrieved 16 February 2026.
  43. ↑ "James Chadwick Medal and Prize recipients | Institute of Physics". www.iop.org. Retrieved 2026-07-23.
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