Elementary Particle Theory

Texas A&M Research Foundation, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

Research in theoretical particle physics will proceed in two main directions. For a number of years now, theorists have been deeply interested in the role that gravity plays in the interaction of the many microscopic particles of high energy physics and how one may unify all the forces of nature with gravity. A leading theory to understand this is string theory. Strings are extended objects whose different oscillations describe the different particles. Strings are one dimensional objects, and two dimensional objects such as membranes and even higher dimensional objects called "branes" can exist and are believed to play a fundamental role in unifying the forces. This framework for describing the forces of nature will be developed further and the important issue of seeing how Einstein's theory of general relativity emerges from the general unification will be investigated. It is generally believed that the laws of physics will be modified at higher energies from the currently known laws that hold at low energies. Over the next five years, high energy accelerators, experiments to detect the dark matter in the universe, and satellite experiments on cosmology will be able to test this. There are now several leading proposals as to what the nature of these new laws might be, and research will be carried out to determine the signals that might show up at these experiments that will allow us to infer from the experiments the new fundamental laws of nature.