We look for new physics in events with top quarks using LHC proton-proton collisions at the CMS detector. A direct search for top quark partners in the form of vector-like quarks is performed, complemented by an indirect but model-independent search for new physics interacting with top quarks using precision top quark properties measurements. In order to enable these and similar analyses to continue at the future High Luminosity LHC, we study the performance of the upgraded track trigger for events with top quarks, including optimisation of reconstruction algorithms and working points.

The Rutherford International Fellowship Programme (RIFP) will be a new, high-quality Post-Doctoral scheme aimed at research excellence and promoting researcher mobility and training. The Programme will be open to applications across a very diverse range of science areas, spanning the world-class expertise of facilities and departments run by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), the Daresbury Laboratory (DL) and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC). Included will be the ISIS neutron and muon source, Diamond Light Source, RAL Space, RAL Particle Physics, the Central Laser Facility, Accelerator Science and Technology, Scientific Computing and STFC Technology Department. The Fellowships will be a unique opportunity for researchers to work within high quality interdisciplinary science campuses. RAL/DL/UKATC provide excellent environments for post-doctoral researchers: they have a wide variety of facilities and equipment for researcher use, experienced science staff to support Fellows' research, and are visited by many thousands of researchers every year who use the central facilities, ideal for networking and collaboration. The Programme will support 36 2-year Fellows over its 5-year term. There will be three, annual calls for proposals, widely publicised to attract the highest quality researchers. Fellowships will aim for scientific excellence, with consideration also for interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral activity. Fellows will be supervised by experienced STFC and Diamond researchers, who will be concerned not just with their scientific progress but with their wider training and development. STFC provides excellent working and employment conditions which researchers will benefit from. STFC departments will gain high-quality international researchers working within them. Because this is a new Programme it is expected to have high impact for the Fellows themselves and their host department.

Infrared sensing technology has a central role to play in addressing 21st century global challenges in healthcare, security and environmental sensing. Promising new applications hinge on the ability to detect individual quanta of light: single photons. At infrared wavelengths this is a formidable task due to the low photon energy, and commercial-off-the-shelf technologies fall far short of the required performance. IRIS will engineer revolutionary photon counting infrared imaging and sensing solutions, with unprecedented spectral range, efficiency, timing resolution and low noise. Using state-of-the-art materials and nanofabrication techniques, novel superconducting detector technology will be scaled up from single pixels to large area photon counting arrays. Efficient readout and optical coupling solutions will be developed and implemented. IRIS will exploit space age cryogenic technology to create compact and mobile detector systems. IRIS will deploy these systems for the first time in revolutionary infrared imaging and sensing applications: dosimetry for laser based cancer treatment, atmospheric remote sensing of greenhouse gases and real-time distributed fibre sensing for geothermal energy.

Our Aim This project aims to develop and design a new satellite mission. This new mission concept will be a spaceborne multispectral canopy lidar (called SpeCL, 'speckle') that can measure the vertical profile of a forest and simultaneously determine the spectral characteristics of that profile. Since lidars can provide highly detailed 3D information on the structure of forest they have great potential in reducing the uncertainties in the terrestrial carbon cycle and of supporting the accurate mapping of land cover. The primary scientific objective of the SpeCL mission would be to determine the global distribution of above ground biomass in the world's forests using an appropriate sampling strategy, and to reduce uncertainties in the calculations of carbon stocks and fluxes associated with the terrestrial biosphere. Why is this important? Greenhouse gases associated with forestry (deforestation and degradation) accounts for roughly 17% of global emissions, more than the entire global transport network. A recent report to the Prime Minister (the 2008 Eliasch Review on Financing Global Forests) predicts that without action, the global economic cost of climate change caused by deforestation alone could reach $1 trillion a year by 2100. Most emissions of carbon from land-use change are currently from the tropics as a result of deforestation, which releases the carbon stored in biomass and soils to the atmosphere (as CO2) as organic matter is burned or decays. The regular monitoring and assessment of land cover change is therefore essential to understand the extent and impact of natural and anthropogenic changes Furthermore, analysis of the global carbon cycle shows that the annual emissions of carbon are larger than the annual accumulations of carbon in the atmosphere and oceans, suggesting a terrestrial sink for carbon in addition to that attributable to changes in land use. Remarkably, this as yet unexplained residual sink seems to have increased over the last decades in proportion to total carbon emissions, implying that carbon feedbacks are offsetting each other. This balance is unlikely to persist. The SpeCL mission is an opportunity to constrain both the net emissions of carbon from land-use/land-use change, and the residual terrestrial sink. Any further delay in understanding the carbon budget may have serious long term consequences if we leave too little time to respond. How will we do it? Edinburgh has pioneered the development of the world's first Multi Spectral Canopy Lidar (patent number 0808340.4). Using seedcorn funding from CEOI, we built the first 4-wavelength lidar, demonstrated its use in the lab and modelled the seasonal response. An airborne MSCL (A-MSCL) instrument has been designed and proposed to NERC on July 1st. In anticipation of future mission opportunities (and the long lead time required), there exists an imminent need for determining the feasibility and technical readiness of a spaceborne MSCL. In the first instance we will create a concept for the high cost, but low risk option of a traditional small satellite configuration with a cost ceiling of £100M. We will then aim to develop this concept to an ultra-low cost (<£5M), rapid deployment (within 3 years) micro-satellite platform using off-the-shelf components and where appropriate, 'proved' technologies. To this end we will consider the highly novel, high risk, but very low cost option of using a modular CubeSat platform.

The main aim of the ENACT project is to combine computer simulation with materials synthesis and experimental characterization to optimize the design of liquid-phase systems for chemical technologies. By optimization, we understand an improvement in efficiency, sustainability and environmental impact. The quest for such processes is rapidly becoming a necessity in a global scale. Air pollution, energy shortages, and global warming are very serious matters, whose remediation we embrace here as an integral part of the research agenda. This goal will be achieved by first gaining an understanding of the structural, dynamical, and thermodynamic properties of a variety of systems by means of computer simulation. This will allow us to tune their properties by modifying at will, in silico, the choice of materials and external conditions. This knowledge will be then transferred to the experimental partners who will synthesize and characterize the selected systems. If they do not perform as expected, or prove difficult or expensive to produce, a new computational cycle will be required. If they do work, simulation will be used again to fine-tune them. A particularly innovative aspect is that six independent themes will be tackled in parallel under a single umbrella, thus enabling the exchange of ideas and methods between them and paving the way to unexpected technologies arising from cross-fertilization between the various themes. This programme will be accomplished with the participation of four institutions: QUB (UK), UCD (Ireland), ISIS (UK) and UNCUYO (Argentina) with complementary expertise in various aspects of materials modelling, synthesis and characterization. To exploit in an optimal way this distributed expertise, a generous scheme of training (School and Workshops) and secondments has been put in place for ESRs, with shorter visits of ERs. Outreach activities have been included to target the general public and businesses, for exploitation of results.