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Dr Mike Pentney

Position

Software Developer

Career Overview

Dr Mike Pentney has a BSc (Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics.  Mike worked freelance with Peters Research for about 20 years before joining as a staff member in 2017.  He writes software for Elevate and associated Peters Research Ltd products.

Previously, Dr Pentney worked as a research associate at Queen Mary & Westfield College and Brunel University.  He was a member of the UA2 collaboration studying collisions between protons and anti-protons at the SPS particle accelerator at Cern and later became an CERN Research Fellow.

He is a Chartered Physicist CPhys, MInstP (Institute of Physics)

Qualifications

Cambridge University

1985 – 1989

PhD in Experimental Particle Physics

Leeds University

1982 – 1985

BSc (Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering

  • Chartered Physicist: CPhys, MInstP (Institute of Physics)

Professional Experience

1997 – present

  • Developed 3D graphics software for the Arup Group’s in-house CAD applications (written in C++ using the OpenGL graphics package on Microsoft Windows)
  • Contributed code for parts of Peters Research Ltd’s flagship Elevate lift traffic analysis application (also using C++ on Windows). Also wrote a Windows application used by Peters Research Ltd to conduct lift traffic surveys in buildings worldwide.
  • Developed a prototype web application for Thyssen Krupp (North America) (using Python & Django) to schedule emergency call-outs to lifts that have broken down.
  • Developed code to add 3D graphics for Zephyr Associates Inc to their StyleAdvisor investment portfolio management application in C++ and OpenGL.
  • Developed a lighting design CAD program in collaboration with Arup. This involved re-writing an existing Fortran program in C++ and building a new user interface to run on Microsoft Windows. This work included developing a separate Windows application to edit and display industry-standard photometric data files describing the light output of lamps and fittings.
  • Developed (with two colleagues) a web application listing films coming up on TV, and included critics ratings from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and plot synopses from an online database. I wrote the server code in Python using the popular Django web-application framework, while a colleague wrote the front-end code in Javascript. 
  • Studying of new technologies, concentrating on functional programming languages such as Scala, Haskell, Clojure and Clojurescript, in the belief that functional programming offers the best approach to developing code for modern multi-core machines, as well as several other key advantages.
Research Associate, Dept of Physics, Queen Mary & Westfield College

1994 – 1997

  • Working with members of the ATLAS collaboration from the Universities of Birmingham, Heidelberg and Mainz and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the design and development of the “first-level trigger” of the ATLAS experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATLAS_experiment). This system uses signals from the calorimeter subsystem (which measures the energy of particles) to identify potentially interesting collisions in real time.
Research Associate, Dept of Physics, Brunel University

1991 to 1994

  • Continued working with teams developing technologies for LHC experiments.
  • Developed a very sensitive particle detector and the associated analogue electronics for use in commercial time-of-flight mass-spectrometry instruments manufactured and sold by Finnigan MAT Ltd (based in Hemel Hempsted).
CERN Research Fellow

1989 to 1991

  • Continued working with the UA2 collaboration while at CERN. In addition I worked with teams researching potential particle detector and data acquisition systems for the Large Hadron Collider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC)

1985 to 1989

  • A member of the UA2 collaboration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UA2) studying collisions between protons and anti-protons at the SPS particle accelerator at CERN.
  • Responsible for designing and building a digital image-processing system for the Scintillating Fibre Detector (SFD). The SFD consisted of about 60,000 plastic optical fibres 1mm in diameter and 2m long arranged in concentric cylinders around the collision point.
  • Particles produced in the proton – anti-proton collisions passed through the optical fibres and generated tiny flashes of light. These signals were amplified by image intensifiers and converted to electrical signals by CCD cameras.
  • Designed system to process the output of the CCDs in real time and compressed the data volume from about 250 Gbytes/second down to about 100Mbytes/second. The processing algorithm was implemented entirely in hardware for maximum speed.

Publications

R E Ansorge at al  Performance of a Scintillating Fiber Detector for the UA2 Upgrade Nuclear Instruments and Methods A265 (1988) pages 33-49

J Alitti at al  Performance of the Scintillating Fiber Detector in the Upgraded UA2 Detector  Nuclear Instruments and Methods A279 (1989) pages 364-375

C N Booth et al  The UA2 Scintillating Fiber Detector  Nuclear Instruments and Methods A273 (1988) pages 826-832

UA2 Collaboration (T Akesson set al)  Search for Top Quark Production at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Zeitschrift fur Physik C46 (1990) page 179-208

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Search for Squark and Gluino Production at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B235 (1990) pages 363-372

UA2 Collaboration (T Akesson et al)  Search for Scalar Electrons and Winos at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B238 (1990) pages 442-450

S G Katvars, B T McCluskey, J M Pentney  A Fastbus Digitizer for the UA2 Scintillating Fiber Detector  Nuclear Instruments and Methods A 276 (1989) pages 482-491

A R Weinberg at al  Performance of the UA2 Scintillating Fiber Detector  Nuclear Instruments and Methods A283 (1989) pages 646-649

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Measurement of the W and Z Production Cross-sections at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Zeitschrift fur Physik C47 (1990) pages 11-22

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Precise Determination of the W and Z Masses at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B241 (1990) pages 150-164

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Measurement of the Transverse Momentum Distributions of W and Z Bosons at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Zeitschrift fur Physik C47 (1990) pages 523-532

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Measurement of Two-Jet Decays of the W and Z Bosons at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Zeitschrift fur Physik C49 (1991) pages 17-28

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Inclusive Jet Cross-Section and a Search for Quark Compositeness at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B257 (1991) pages 232-240

H Mueller at al  Buses and Standards for LHC  ECFA Large Hadron Collider Workshop Proceedings (1990)

D Linnhofer et al  Use of Fastbus at LHC  ECFA Large Hadron Collider Workshop Proceedings (1990)

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Measurement of the direct photon production cross-section at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B263 (1991) pages 544-550

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Measurement of electron-tau universality from decays of intermediate vector bosons at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Zeitschrift fur Physik C52 (1991) pages 209-218

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Determination of the Strong Coupling Constant alpha-s from W production at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B263 (1991) pages 563-572

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A Study of multi-jet events at the CERN anti-proton proton collider and a search for double parton scattering  Physics Letters B268 (1991) pages 145-154

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitte et al)  A search for scalar leptoquarks at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B274 (1992) pages 507-512

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Study of electron pair production below the Z mass at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B275 (1992) pages 202-208

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  An improved determination of the ratio of the W and Z masses at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B276 (1992) pages 354-364

UA2 Collaboration (J Alittie et al)  A measurement of the W and Z production cross-sections and a determination of gamma(W) at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B276 (1992) pages 365-374

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Direct measurement of the W-gamma coupling at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B277 (1992) pages 194-202

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Experimental Limit on the Decay W+ -> pi+ – gamma at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B277 (1992) pages 203-208

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A search for charged Higgs from top quark decay at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B280 (1992) pages 137-145

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A measurement of single and double prompt photon production at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B288 (1992) pages 386-394

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  Measurement of the gluon structure function from direct photon data at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Physics Letters B299 (1993) pages 174-182

UA2 Collaboration (J Alitti et al)  A search for new intermediate vector mesons and excited quarks decaying to two jets at the CERN anti-proton proton collider  Nuclear Physics B400 (1993) pages 3-24

I Brawn et al  First Level Trigger Systems for LHC Experiments  CERN Report CERN-DRDC-94-52

ATLAS Collaboration (W W Armstrong et al)  ATLAS: Technical Proposal for a general purpose p-p experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN  CERN Report CERN-LHCC-94-43

D C Imrie, J M Pentney, J S Cottrell  A Faraday cup detector for high mass ions in matrix assisted laser desorption-ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight mass spectrometry  Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry Volume 9 Issue 13 (1995) pages 1293-1296

I P Brawn et al  The level-1 calorimeter trigger system for ATLAS  CERN Report CERN-ATL-DAQ-95-030 (1995)

I P Brawn et al  A demonstrator programme for the ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger  CERN Report CERN-ATL-DAQ-95-031 (1995)

ATLAS Collaboration (A Airapetian et al)  ATLAS computing technical proposal  CERN Report CERN-LHCC-96-43 (1996)

ATLAS Collaboration (A Airapetian et al)  ATLAS calorimeter performance technical design report  CERN Report CERN-LHCC-96-40 (1996)

V Perera et al  A level-1 calorimeter trigger for the ATLAS experiment: demonstrator system  Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Electronics for LHC, Balatonfuered, Hungary 1996 pages 137-140

C Bohm et al Operation of the ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger demonstrator system  Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Electronics for LHC Experiments, London, UK 1997 pages 378-382

A Connors et al  Performance of the front-end demonstrator system for the ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger  Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Electronics for LHC Experiments, London, UK 1997 pages 383-387

P Bright-Thomas et al  ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger system architecture  Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Electronics for LHC Experiments, Rome, Italy 1998 pages 311-315

V Perera at al  The e/gamma and tau/hadron processor system for the ATLAS first-level trigger  Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Electronics for LHC Experiments, Rome, Italy 1998 pages 316-320

ATLAS Collaboration (A Airapetian et al)  ATLAS: Detector and physics performance technical design report Volume 1  CERN Report CERN-LHCC-99-15 (1999)

C Bohm et al  Test beam results from the ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger demonstrator  IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science 46 (1999) pages 904-909

R Achenbach at al The ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger  Journal of Instrumentation 3 (2008)