Rate My Professor Konstantinos Petridis

Dr. Konstantinos Petridis holds the position of Associate Professor in Particle Physics within the School of Physics at the University of Bristol. He earned his PhD and MSci degrees from the University of London. Since 2014, he has served as a faculty member at Bristol, initially as Senior Lecturer in Particle Physics before advancing to his current role. His primary research specialization lies in experimental particle physics, focusing on the precise study of rare processes such as the decays of bottom quarks, particularly rare B-hadron decays observed with the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. This research probes discrepancies between experimental observations and Standard Model predictions, potentially revealing signatures of new physics beyond the current theoretical framework, or clarifying unaccounted hadronic effects and experimental systematics. Petridis's investigations aim to uncover new particles or forces at energy scales inaccessible to direct collider searches by analyzing these infrequently occurring decays with high precision.

In addition to his core experimental work, Petridis contributes to advancing computational methods for particle physics, including the development of novel architectures like Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Units to manage the enormous data volumes from next-generation experiments. A notable highlight of his career is his leadership in a pivotal 2021 LHCb measurement that furnished the first evidence of a possible violation of lepton universality in beauty-quark decays, challenging established particle physics theory. He presented these results at a CERN seminar, describing the effort as a 'seven-year saga' during which subtle anomalies accumulated, with Bristol PhD students now spearheading confirmatory analyses. The potential discovery of a new force represents a profound advancement toward understanding the Universe's composition, including the 95% dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. Petridis has authored or co-authored over 114 peer-reviewed articles, including recent works such as 'A model-independent measurement of the CKM angle γ in the decays B± → [K+K−π+π−]Dh± and B±→[π+π−π+π−]Dh± (h = K, π)' (Journal of High Energy Physics, 2026), 'Amplitude analysis and branching fraction measurement of the decay D0 → K0S π0 π0' (Journal of High Energy Physics, 2026), and 'A method for luminosity determination based on real-time hit reconstruction with the LHCb silicon pixel detector' (Journal of Instrumentation, 2026). His contributions continue to influence high-energy physics through ongoing LHCb analyses and innovative data processing techniques.