Lottie Cavanagh attends the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

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Lottie (second from the left) with former CERN Director General Rolf Heuer and other CERN colleagues.

The 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting was held from 30th June to 5th July 2024 in Lindau, Germany. A tiny island on Lake Constance that hosted 600 young scientists and 38 Nobel Laureates. The Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings are a wonderful opportunity for outstanding young research scientists to interact with Nobel Laureates. The meetings, taking place annually since 1951, alternate between three disciplines: Physics, Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine - this year it was dedicated to Physics. Since 2023, the meetings have been open to not only postdocs, but also to a select number of PhD, masters and bachelors students. It is a great opportunity for young researchers and this year Liverpool PhD student Lottie Cavanagh was selected to attend the meeting after being nominated by the Department and supported by Vice Chancellor, Prof Tim Jones. 

Lottie is a particle physics PhD student working on one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the FASER experiment. FASER is a small detector that focuses on the study of dark matter and high-energy collider neutrinos produced in LHC collisions. During her studies Lottie has played a key role in searches for new dark matter particles. Together with the Liverpool FASER team, led by Prof. Monica D’Onofrio and Dr Carl Gwilliam (also her PhD supervisors), these searches have produced world-leading results. Lottie has recently returned from CERN after spending more than a year working on detector operations and on experimental data analysis.

“The Lindau meeting was a great opportunity to meet physicists in other areas than high energy particle physics” says Lottie “In addition to hearing the perspectives of Nobel prize-winning researchers, there was also the chance to chat and discuss with material scientists, cosmologists, quantum computing experts, and biochemical engineers. I feel very fortunate to have been selected to attend this meeting, the attitude of those attending and the breadth of topics discussed made for a refreshing and engaging week of science”.