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]

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]

As of 2017^[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.^[14] This tells us about the physics which was most important in the first few moments after the Big Bang.^[14] His research collaborators^[4][6][15] include Brian Cox^[10][5] and Jeff Forshaw^[16] and he has supervised or co-supervised several successful PhD students to completion on the ATLAS experiment,^[17][18][19] ZEUS^{[20][21][22][23]} and HERA.^{[24][25][26][27][28]}

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.^[29]

His research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)^[30] and the Royal Society.^[14]

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

Butterworth was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2009^[14][3] and shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2015 for his book Smashing Physics.^[3] He was awarded the James Chadwick Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2013.^[3] 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]

Smashing Physics was also shortlisted for Book of the Year by Physics World in 2014.^{[citation needed]}