Flavorful New Physics

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds the research activities of Professor Wolfgang Altmannshofer at the University of Cincinnati. Particle physics has reached a pivotal point. The Standard Model of particle physics provides a remarkably successful description of the fundamental building blocks of Nature and the forces acting among them. The absence of clear experimental evidence thus far for physics beyond the Standard Model challenges the idea of "naturalness" as the guiding principle in the search for new physics. It is therefore becoming more and more crucial to broadly explore new regimes of physics beyond the Standard Model. The research of Professor Altmannshofer will serve the national interest by advancing our understanding of the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions. In particular, his research aims to address the following fundamental questions: Is the Higgs boson the origin of mass of all the known elementary matter particles? Are there new fundamental forces among elementary particles beyond the strong, the weak, and the electromagnetic interactions? Do elementary matter particles posses characteristic properties other than their mass and interactions that allow us to distinguish them? As part of the proposed program, Professor Altmannshofer will also strengthen and extend the existing particle-physics outreach program at the Physics Department of the University of Cincinnati. Students and teachers from local high schools will be invited to the department to participate in hands-on activities and to learn about the latest cutting-edge developments in particle physics. More technically, Professor Altmannshofer will construct and classify novel frameworks of mass generation for the light quarks and leptons and identify their characteristic signatures at high-energy and high-intensity experiments. He will also develop new ways to search for feeble interactions among leptons and neutrinos at current and future neutrino facilities at Fermilab. Furthermore, he will develop sophisticated methods to search for new sources of flavor and CP violation using rare b hadron decays that largely eliminate hadronic uncertainties. Without such methods, the new physics sensitivity of rare b decays is limited by poorly understood hadronic contributions, and current hints for anomalies in the rare b decay data cannot be clarified. Professor Altmannshofer's research program will provide several new and improved search strategies for physics beyond the Standard Model that are critical in enhancing the prospects for discovery at the energy and intensity frontiers.